Quest2Learn: An Accessible Platform for Lab Science Education

Case study: Chinat Yu (Johns Hopkins University), Elizabeth Aufzien (Johns Hopkins University), Hakeoung Hannah Lee (University of Texas at Austin) and Jeffery Ji Zhou (Johns Hopkins University) Siddharth Ananth (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract

Developing confidence in a lab environment requires ample opportunities to practice lab skills; a textbook or even a video tutorial is not always sufficient to ensure students can use equipment and perform procedures correctly. The pandemic has highlighted the lack of viable existing solutions to enable students from all backgrounds to learn lab sciences as it has accelerated the trend towards online and HyFlex spaces of learning. Many state-of-the-art applications require expensive setups like a VR headset, and the traditional video and text-based solutions are not an adequate substitute for hands-on experience. During the last year, we developed prototype lab modules that are available in beta for Apple and Android devices. This ensures that our solution is accessible to many students and communities. It also addresses the inequities of educational resources in the US and around the world by putting lab experiments within the reach of students anywhere. We have been able to integrate our lab modules into Introductory Biology and Biochemistry laboratory courses at a large private University. We tested two different designs of our AR system (dynamic and scenic) with over 100 students who had varying levels of prior experience with lab sciences. Our main findings were that students with little-to-no lab experience preferred the scenic AR modules over the dynamic ones, as they found the dynamic modules and the high degree of freedom to be overwhelming. More experienced students also tended to favor the more guided scenic AR modules, but some expressed a preference for dynamic modules due to the added challenge and immersion. In light of these findings, we believe that student learning, at any level, can be improved if they first receive a highly constrained step-by-step tutorial learning module followed by a more interactive playground learning module. Such a system of procedural education is substantiated by the two-stage theory of mental model construction, and we plan to test this hypothesis further in the near future.