Acquisition of Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Engineering Education through Hypermedia and Virtual Reality: an Experimental Study of Student's Learning of the Structure and Functioning of a Turning Lathe

The present study describes the realization and validation of a prototypal system for machine tools teaching in a Virtual Reality environment, integrated with hypermedia, for technical schools and engineering university courses. The instructional environment was designed to develop both declarative and procedural knowledge about the turning lathe. The goal is to lead students not only to understand the structure and functioning of the lathe, but also to use such a machine. To reach this, the prototype tries to foster conceptual changes in students' mental models and to increase students' control over the learning process. A series of experimental tests have been carried out to assess the educational validity of the instructional tool which has been devised. The experimental investigation consists of two phases. The aim of the first phase is to assess whether students could use easily the virtual lathe and to verify what they learn about such a machine. The purpose of the second phase is to focus on some critical aspects of the learning process activated by using the virtual lathe in order to realize which are the instructional procedures which give the best results.