Virtual Reality Environments as a Support in Elementary School

Introduction

Nowadays, emerging technologies have taken a fundamental role in various areas of society derived from the current situation, in which physical contact and closeness between people must be taken care of due to COVID-19 (Burgess & Sievertsen, 2020; Organization, n.d.). Virtual reality is one of the emerging technologies that can be a support to the teaching-learning process as they allow the user to acquire knowledge in an immersive and interactive way (Wickens, 1992; Yu-Che & Yi-Ru, 2019). The virtual environments offered by virtual reality can help students construct their learning in an effective way through experiences abstracted from reality in which they can represent different concepts and interact with well-defined elements within virtual scenarios (Hamilton et al., 2021; Winterbottom & Blake, 2008).

In this sense, virtual reality-oriented to elementary education can facilitate those students can have effective learning with an experience that allows them to endure knowledge for life, since being an immersive and interactive experience students can put into practice the knowledge learned theoretically in the classroom through content in which they can perform tasks within a virtual representation of reality (Liou et al., 2017).

By performing a series of tasks within a virtual environment, evaluation mechanisms can be established to know the student's performance against a real problem. Moreover, since virtual reality is a safe representation of learning, it allows the inclusion of students with physical or intellectual limitations and learning according to their abilities. Likewise, the use of virtual reality in education is not limited to elementary education and it can be part of the teaching and learning processes from elementary education to higher education and in the field of industry as a fundamental part of training and simulation (Johnson et al., 2002; Liou et al., 2017). It is a technology that can be easily incorporated into the school context, since laboratories can be created where students can go to have interactive learning sessions, and this can also be another tool to support teachers (Team, 2019).

This paper proposes the production and use of virtual reality environments as a support for the acquisition of skills within the teaching and learning process of elementary school children. The design elements of the software and technological platforms, the user-centered aspects, and the importance of multidisciplinary teams for the production of virtual reality environments according to the needs of the users are presented, thus offering teachers, parents, and students solutions that can promote the acquisition of learning skills through the execution of various tasks designed by a multidisciplinary group, encouraging the user to acquire learning skills in an immersive, safe and fun way.