Dr. Shuchi Deb of the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering (IMSE) Department has received Research on Emerging Technologies for Teaching and Learning (RETTL) Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant provides a total funding of $837,138 for three years and supports three tenure-track female faculties (PI: Dr. Shuchi Deb, co-PIs: Dr. Emma Yang and Dr. Amanda Olsen), two doctoral students, and six undergraduate students over the project period. The project has started on June 15, 2022.

This project focuses on additive manufacturing and will leverage emerging technologies by using virtual reality to develop a bilingual (English/Spanish) immersive learning environment for engineering students. All students, including students with disabilities, will be given access to the cutting-edge learning modules within virtual environments.

Additive manufacturing technologies play a critical role in future manufacturing; however, they pose high-level safety-related threats to workers and environments. Hence, workers who need to directly or indirectly work with these technologies must be professionally trained with hands-on experience to gain the specific certified skills needed.

The learning platform developed during this project will transform traditional approaches of learning and teaching and improve engineering education in additive manufacturing. After the development of the learning platform and course modules, the program will be deployed in multiple classrooms to collect data on student interactions with the course modules. Students’ facial expressions and eye movements will be collected in real-time along with their interactions with the course materials. Data from this study will enable us to develop a model to design assistive functionalities within the virtual platform. This model can create useful feedback and additional instructions or question students’ selections, substitute instructors’ supervision, and provide assistance. The outcomes of this project will be a novel bilingual learning and teaching platform with real-time assistance to significantly enhance student engagement and performance in active learning.