VRES CaMP

OVERVIEW

The School of Engineering at Cal State East Bay has developed the Virtual Reality Engineering Summer Camp (VRES Camp) as part of the STEM Educational Gaming Research Group to promote high-school paths to undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The purpose of the camp is to create a model summer high-school program that engages future undergraduate STEM participants as designers and programming and coding developers of immersive, interactive, and digitally-based environments (i.e., virtual reality simulations). The goal of the camp is to promote, inspire, and increase the pursuit and retention of STEM degrees; and foster interest in pursuing professional or graduate degrees through the acquisition of knowledge and skills. To achieve this goal, the VRES Camp challenges participants to design technology-based interventions (virtual reality simulations). Using gaming and instructional design processes, the participants will get to engage in this fun and innovative field by exploring seminal and current simulation research, interacting with professionals and industry representatives, designing, programming, coding, and developing simulation for the advancement of engineering structures and architecture. Based on theories of multimedia learning, visualization, virtual reality, serious gaming, and active learning, the participants (as designers) will focus on developing digital technology-based simulations, which will support their acquisition of knowledge, skills, and behaviors necessary to pursue STEM degrees and professions. The development of the VRES Camp is aligned to the current work performed by the School of Engineering at Cal State East Bay.