XR Workshops

XREN Joint Lab in Milan (19-21 May 2025)

The second XR Learning Workshop of the XREN Joint Lab was held at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, from 19 to 21 May 2025. The event, entitled Extended Reality Tools to Support Learning Activities in Engineering, brought together students and project partners to explore how extended reality (XR) can support engineering education.

The Joint Lab contributed to the objectives of the XREN Erasmus+ project by connecting the project’s XR learning workflows and applications with a hands-on educational setting. It gave participants the opportunity to compare physical and virtual learning experiences, apply good practices for designing XR-based learning activities, and collaboratively improve an existing learning application. In this way, the event linked technical development with the project’s broader aim of making engineering learning more interactive, practice-oriented, and accessible through XR.

Activities

The Joint Lab activities were organised around three complementary strands:

Technical workshops
- Introduction to the software and tools used for XR development.
- Practical introduction to Unity for virtual-reality development.
- Design of user interfaces and interaction in VR.
- Discussion of XR design methodologies and good practices.
- Definition of learning objectives and structuring of XR-based learning workflows.
- Team work to apply the learning-workflow concepts and improve the XR learning experience.
Laboratory activity: VR versus hands-on product analysis

Students worked with a worm gearbox in two parallel modes: disassembly of a physical prototype and disassembly of the same product in a VR application.

The activity included a pre-assessment, two rounds in which groups exchanged experiences, learning and post-activity questionnaires, and a final focus-group discussion. Its objective was to examine the effectiveness of XR in supporting the learning of an engineering topic in comparison with direct practical experience.
Final student challenge

After testing the application, the students formed teams and identified opportunities to improve its XR interaction and learning experience. They then developed and deployed their proposed improvements, prepared a final presentation, and discussed their work during a shared wrap-up session with questions and answers.

Assessment results

The laboratory assessment measured the number of questions answered correctly about the gearbox and its operation. In the reported results, the physical experience group achieved 69 correct answers in total, while the VR experience group achieved 60. The physical experience therefore produced the higher raw total in this activity. The comparison should be interpreted descriptively, since the reported groups were not the same size (13 students in the physical condition and 10 in the VR condition).

The item-level results also showed a mixed pattern rather than a uniform advantage for one mode. The physical condition performed better on several questions concerning the driving element, the number of gear teeth, the worm thread, the number of worm starts, and the gear ratio. The VR condition scored higher on identifying the bearing arrangement and the component carrying the axial thrust, while both conditions obtained the same result for whether the worm mechanism’s input and output could be switched and for ordering the assembly steps.