Breaking bad behavior: immersive training of class room management

Abstract

This article presents a fully immersive portable low-cost Virtual Reality system to train classroom management skills. An instructor controls the simulation of a virtual classroom populated with 24 semi-autonomous virtual agents via a desktop-based graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI provides behavior control and trainee evaluation widgets alongside a non-immersive view of the class and the trainee. The trainee's interface uses an Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and earphones for output. A depth camera and the HMD's built-in motion sensors are used for tracking the trainee and for avatar animation. An initial evaluation of both interfaces confirms the system's usefulness, specifically its capability to successfully simulate critical aspects of classroom management.