Nathan Miller, Tyler Miller, Pavel Peev, and Gary Yuen
June 2022

[Capstone: Presentation Slides]

This capstone was done under the Cross-Reality Collaboration Sandbox (CRCS) research group and the overall goal was to create a virtual learning environment. The application is a multi-user virtual learning space where students and teachers can meet to share ideas through drawings. Drawings from all students and teachers are hung on the walls of the environment resembling an art gallery or an art walk. This format allows all teachers and students to learn about different ideas on the same topic being taught within a confined space.

Most virtual classrooms experience the issue of engaging students in course content while also struggling to develop a sense of community. Factors that may cause this issue is students’ reluctance to participate with people they may not know well, not many options are given to students to co-mingle, and teachers have a hard time getting feedback. Students can communicate by drawing, typing, or importing images onto their own canvas. The variety of tools are designed to cater to students’ preferred strengths since some students are more inclined to draw than type their answers and vice versa. When a student submits their work everyone in the class can see what they have submitted on the walls without their username being attached to the work. This helps circumvent the fear of being wrong in front of everyone since nobody will know who has submitted a canvas.

The overall application is unique since multiple avenues are given to the user to communicate their ideas in correlation with the way those ideas are presented in the given space. The takeaways learned from this capstone is that software development is a continuous cycle of presenting new ideas and refining those concepts into a final product. Without the proper communication and planning, sorting out these ideas into programming tasks would be difficult.