A Systematic Mapping Study on Low-Cost Immersive Virtual Reality for Microbiology

Abstract

Educators are increasingly recognizing the advantages and benefits of Virtual Reality to broaden their teaching experiences in biology. Besides giving them another way to visualize learning objects, transforming their students from spectators to actors in the learning process. However, little has been discussed about the use of these low-cost immersive environments. Thus, the reviewed publications were retrieved by extracting keywords from documents indexed in four digital scientific libraries, which were then systematically filtered using exclusion, inclusion, semi-automated methods. This paper addresses three key points: which technologies are used in microbiology teaching, which of these are in the Virtual Reality technology domain, and which are implemented with low-cost resources. The mapping was performed between application domains and learning content and between design elements and learning content. We noted that most of the reviewed works have an evaluation of the usability of the applications, not focusing on the educational feasibility or the learning outcomes that can be obtained by them. We observed that the publications show gaps in the actual use and our review indicates unexplored areas, both at the level of the application project centered on the user and in the requirements of educational viability, thus being able to motivate future work in the field.