An exploration of combining virtual and physical robots in robotics education

This study examined the effects of virtual and physical robots (VPR) using in different learning stages (simple session/complex session) in a robotics programming course. A quasi-experimental design was implemented with 84 junior high school students from two classes. One class with 44 students used combination of VPR strategy for learning, whereas the other class with 42 students used only physical robots (the PR strategy) to learn the same content materials. Results showed that no significant difference was found in the students' learning attitude, programming skills, and learning engagement between VPR and PR, while significant difference existed in engineering design ability and cognitive load, no matter in simple or complex learning sessions. Although the VPR strategy is not always better than the PR one, it has unique advantages on facilitating students' higher-order thinking in solving complex problem, as well as reducing their cognitive load. These findings highlight that VPR is more valuable to the engineering design tasks than PR, and indicate a potential direction in the future to integrate Virtual Reality/Augment Reality into robotics education.