Virtual experiments for introduction of computing: Using virtual reality technology

Introduction to Computing is a public course for the first-year non-major undergraduate students, aiming at training students for the abilities in computer science and technology with computational thinking. However, as new computer technologies emerge continuously and rapidly, it is required for this course to accommodate more and more knowledge. Therefore the teaching contents are growing enormously, which makes it very difficult to cover all of them in limited hours, and therefore sets an obstacle in understanding computing principles and building up a clear and general picture of computing, especially for non-major students. As computer science and technology are becoming more and more essential for various disciplines and majors, it is urgent for the education community to find out an effective and propagable way to solve this problem. In this regard, we employ virtual reality technology to the experiment teaching of this course, and have developed 18 virtual experiments to support the whole teaching process. For example, Turing machine is a basic model for computer science and technology. However, since it is not a real machine, it is not easy for the students to imagine the working process of Turing machine and understand the related concepts. Another example, the execution of an instruction is very important to understand the principles of computer organization. However, as the information flow is invisible, it is difficult and time-consuming for the teachers to explain how an instruction is executed inside a computer. Therefore, 3D modeling and animation techniques are used to demonstrate the invisible micro-structure of computers, and human-machine interaction and visualization techniques are used to present the internal process of information evolution, thus constructing a complete virtual experiment system of this course, including demonstration experiments, verification experiments and interaction experiments. Our virtual experiments have applied software copyrights and served more than 12,000 students from five universities of China since 2013. The evaluation demonstrates that the virtual experiments have produced excellent results in both teaching effectiveness and learning efficiency, relieved the conflicts between limited hours and vast knowledge, and helped students understand and build up the knowledge of computing.