CUHK Expo 2019/20

Current syllabus of most local high schools descriptively introduces Earth System, but it lacks sufficient field practice and application of interdisciplinary knowledge. Many first-year university students thus take up a longer time to adapt to the new learning approach and some may lose interest gradually once lagging behind. Previous educational videos related to areas like field skill preparation and background of study area successfully raise student’s interest and self-study initiative before the field practice. In order to raise teaching and learning effectiveness as well as student’s motivation in self-learning, our team developed two preliminary platforms of Virtual Reality (VR) and one trial set of Augmented Reality (AR) teaching material. The two VR learning platforms generated with VR360 display onsite ‘real’ scenes with graphic explanations. Students are expected to preview and review the study areas before and after the field excursion. One set of AR material produced with Spark AR Studio consists of six major crystal forms and illustrates some of the mineral physical properties. When combining with extra VR games, the AR materials are believed to provide interactive three-dimensional chemical graphics to help students understand mineral properties that may be difficult for beginner to observe during classroom and laboratory sessions. Most of student helpers in the project, student and staff participants expressed that the VR and AR tools are very attractive and useful to stimulate student’s interest in learning Earth System Science effectively and efficiently.

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Modern genomic technologies have become one of the important tools in diagnosis and guidance in symptoms management. The technologies are commonly applied in identifying micro-organisms and viruses that further dictate specific therapeutic management or personal medicine.

In the nursing curriculum, our students will study laboratory identification of microbes. A number of modern genomic technologies have been discussed with their working principles and clinical applications. Most of our students found difficulties in understanding the principle of genomic technologies. Therefore, this project aims to develop tailor-made virtual reality games for explaining the complicated concepts and showing how the knowledge can be applied in some clinical examples.

A mobile app using virtual reality technology was designed and covered (i) 3D structures of key materials of genomic technology used in clinical applications and (ii) Working principles of genomic technology in 3D virtual reality environment. A quantitative survey was conducted to evaluate users’ satisfaction based on eleven 6-point Likert-type questions.

The results of the quantitative survey demonstrated that the students were satisfied with the clarity, depth and length of the content. They believed that those games were important in facilitating their learning in human genomics. Moreover, they appreciated the interactive exercises in each game. The present games were helpful to support student learning. We expect that those virtual reality games can also be used by other courses offered in the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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Environment education is an important part of education in Universities, but it is always limited by bad weather, insects, safety and epidemic situations such as the outbreak of COVID-19. Hence, we designed an e-learning courseware called Virtual Reality Trail of Plant Learning in CUHK for everyone to have a virtual field trip to experience plants and nature. In our courseware, we will establish three learning routes with the information of on-site plant species. We will present a demonstration version on our first trail, which is the United College of CUHK. This courseware is a free-to-access Web App for all kind of users.

In the courseware, users are brought to a view of 360-degree virtual plant learning trail. They can click the interactive hotspots to switch location points, to view plants photos and to browse external website of plant factsheets. Most of the selected plant species will be enriched with high quality plant photos. Therefore, users can view the close-up photos of various parts of the plants. With all the courseware information, users can learn plants and their habitats even at home, which is different from the traditional face-to-face teaching approach of plant learning.

This courseware is also developed with Virtual Reality technology, users can therefore enjoy a more exciting and realistic plant learning experience using VR goggles. In the future, we will be making more plant learning trails and will be putting more interactive elements into our courseware for a new era of e-teaching and learning in CUHK.

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A flipped classroom approach was conducted with a Gateway Education course on Science & Technology from the support of a cross-university UGC project fund. Before class, students of the course were required to take a virtual reality (VR) field trip to Lamma Winds, the first commercial-scale wind turbine in Tai Ling built by HK Electric, to better understand how electricity can be produced from wind energy. The flipped classroom activity is to facilitate the students to understand the complex mechanism of the wind turbine drive train for electricity generation. A face-to-face class including a traditional lecture, a Q & A session and an in-class group presentation exercise followed to achieve the intended learning outcomes.

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