What is Virtual Lab?
Virtual Labs is an online educational experience that was created for Western Sydney University’s School of Engineering (SoE). It is a Virtual Environment where participants are able to use different engineering rigs.
Project research
To prepare for the project, my team and I attended two in-person civil engineering labs, where we spoke with instructors and students about their experience in these labs.
The key problem areas that we discovered were:
Many students were unable to make it each lab sessions
Range of student engagement in these labs. Many were disengaged and talking amongst their friends, and some were attentive and asking questions
Presentation skills of the demonstrators varied greatly between sessions
Our solution in that case would be an gamified asynchronous learning experience that:
Incorporates the basics of the rigs used in the labs
Allowing students to access the labs at any point in the semester
Is approachable to try through scaffolding, contextual information and ease-of-use
Ways to check knowledge and learning
Gamified experience that pushes users to the next steps in the process
Early ideations and designs
Testing, feedback and takeaways
With an early version of the lab and user interface modelled out, we proceeded to the usability test.
The session indicated positive overall feedback for the game flow, but we also found opportunities to improve the experience further:
Some users had difficulty getting used to WASD style movement
More visual clarity was required when interacting with the rigs and placing objects down
There was some confusion in identifying the next steps in the testing procedures
Following the testing, I decided on a “click to move” style system to assist the users who were uncomfortable with the WASD style controls. In this mode, users would move around the lab by clicking on hotspots.
Additionally, I made changes to the objective tracker:
Displaying only the current step and removing completed and upcoming steps
Added additional contextual prompts if the user is attempting to complete steps out of order
At our follow up test at the end of the next sprint, we provided a version of the lab which only had “click to move” enabled. Very few users expressed difficulty with these new controls, but some did comment that WASD movement would feel more natural to them. Based off of those comments, I decided it would be best to keep both control schemes, with the user able to choose between the two.
Final Designs
Takeaways and impact
Virtual Lab was a challenging but rewarding project to be a part of, with some key ideas to take away for future projects:
Accessibility comes in many forms - I learnt very quickly after the first test that I had neglected to cater for a whole section of users who were uncomfortable with the default movement scheme
This lead to additional time down the line to incorporate an entirely new control scheme.
Balancing discovery and “hand-holding” - Our testing revealed how important it was that we always have ways to direct the player when they are making mistakes or are lost
As opposed to a traditional game experience, learners are often looking for guidance.
Virtual Lab was deployed in early 2025 and our client in the School of Engineering has expressed how pleased they are with the final product.
Student feedback for the experience has been very positive
As students now have some idea of how the different rigs work, they appear to be more engaged when seeing the rigs in real life.
