Virtual Reality Broken Plant Tutorial for Capstone Design

Providing student capstone teams with an opportunity to demonstrate their design competency and complete a team challenge inside a full-scale chemical processing plant provides a novel learning opportunity. A full-scale virtual reality (VR) chemical processing plant was built as an immersive learning application for the Chemical Engineering and Engineering Chemistry capstone design course at Queen’s University in Kingston. During their capstone design course, student teams are required to work on the design of an ampicillin processing facility and the VR application was designed to provide a high-fidelity representation of an operating plant, including a piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID). To examine the impact of this new VR learning tool, a broken plant exercise was designed to examine the efficacy of the application. The student cohort was divided into two groups for the exercise; paper-based, and web VR based. Each group completed several surveys and a tutorial problem. Initial quantitative results comparing the survey responses from both groups will be presented.