Using Virtual Reality in Education of Programming

In modern world programming has become a critical profession and skill that is necessary in order to ensure the proper function of business, social, health and other systems. Emerging artificial intelligence technology and its role in optimizing systems makes the role of programmer even more important since even a slight mistake in these kind of systems could be critical. In order to support rapid development of technology and its practical usage there is a constant need for skilled and well-educated programming professionals. However, the history and current situation in the field of education has shown that programming is hard to learn and that programming courses constantly report rather high failure rates. There are many possible reasons for this kind of situation, and many different approaches that have been used more or less successfully. However, since the mentioned problem of programming courses has persisted to this day, new efforts are needed to help students with their programming efforts. One of possible approaches is using virtual reality as a tool to make programming concepts more understandable to students, and to increase their motivation to spend more time in their programming activities. In this paper, a concise overview of programming education challenges is given, and research results about the potential use and acceptance of virtual reality in student educational activities are given and elaborated. New research approaches and efforts are also stated and discussed.