Effects of a virtual reality teaching application on engineering design creativity of boys and girls

In the context of the importance of promoting women's participation in engineering design and the trend toward applying virtual reality (VR) to teaching, this study investigated the influences of gender and a VR teaching application on engineering design creativity. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test and post-test. A teaching experiment was conducted with 169 seventh-grade students in a junior high school in Taipei City, Taiwan.The primary conclusions reached were as follows: 1.Application of VR to teaching has a moderately positive influence on the Empathize, Define, and Ideate stages of the design process as well as on the total scores for engineering design thinking. This effect is more pronounced in girls than in boys. 2.The application of VR to teaching has a moderately positive influence on the engineering design thought processes of students, with a greater effect observed in girls than in boys.