Measuring Individuals' Systems Thinking Skills through the Development of an Immersive Virtual Reality Complex System Scenarios

Raed Jaradat, Michael Hamilton, Vidanelage Dayarathna, Sofia Karam, Parker Jones, Emily Wall, Safae El Amrani, Ginnie Shih En Hsu
2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings   unpublished
Ginnie Hsu is an Illustrator, a Designer, and a tenure track Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. She believes that well-designed digital experiences and technology can improve the quality of human living, and her goal is to design, make, and create things that have an impact on society. Having this personal mission statement in mind, her design and research have been focusing on human-centered design for the greater good. Abstract The proposed virtual reality (VR) gaming
more » ... o provides a virtual profile that assesses the students' level of systems thinking skills (STS) and offers a starting point to better understand students' capacity to engage complex multidimensional problems. The proposed VR gaming scenario will ask students to understand, investigate, and analyze the provided real-world complex system problem. The VR gaming scenario measures an individual's systems thinking skills based on their approach in solving and dealing with authentic complex system problems. The VR gaming scenario is built based on an established system thinking instrument that consists of seven dimensions: Level of Complexity, Level of Independence, Level of Interaction, Level of Change, Level of Uncertainty, Level of Systems Worldview, and Level of Flexibility. The purpose of this study is to measure student's level of systems skills in the first dimension Complexity vs. Simplicityhow students react to situations and manage uncertainty. The paired samples t-test and one-way ANOVA test were performed to analyze and compare the scores of the systems thinking instrument with the VR gaming scenario. Results showed that the scenarios developed in the VR module can be used as an effective tool to measure students' level of system skills in dealing with complex system problem domains.
doi:10.18260/1-2--33090 fatcat:57dh5j7aozdptmltn4dwx3hsva