Background

Scale Worlds is a virtual learning environment that enhances participants’ conception of size and scale. It was funded through a National Science Foundation award titled Virtual Reality to Improve Students’ Understanding of Scale in STEM. For two years, I worked under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Peterson and in close collaboration with professors and doctoral students from the Human Factors Engineering and STEM Education departments to design and develop this scale cognition learning environment. STEM educators acted as analysts providing educational requirements from literature, as designers, we interpreted these requirements into specific design features in the three virtual environments.

Head-mounted Display

Cave Augmented Virtual Environment

The way in which the user interacts with the environment was designed to mimic changing an exponent in scientific notation and moving decimal places in standard notation: concepts seen in American science and math curricula.

Scale Worlds – Web

I independently created the web version as a way to bring the Scale Worlds experience to people who don't have access to expensive VR equipment.

The core theory of Scale Worlds – VR was mapped into a set of new features which would live more naturally on a flat screen display. I authored a paper about this process, Preserving theoretically-g functions across media platforms in interaction design, which was published in the IASDR 2023 conference proceedings.

Although all of the design features were based in theoretical assertions we utilized user testing at multiple stages throughout the design/development lifecycle. We used user testing in cases where we had determined multiple possible solutions. For example, we tested a variety of enivornment schema to guauge how it affected learners' understanding of objects' scale and the clarity of interactive elements.

"the forest" layout