An ethnographic study on adopting VR development to train students’ 21st century skill

In the 21st century, with the help of powerful computers, Virtual Reality (VR) is widely adopted into education to generate a 3D simulated world and allow learners to experience something that are hardly replicated in reality. There are lots of studies focusing on the way to adopt VR in education. Here, I am not going to work in this area and study how VR can be used to enhance certain subjects’ learning experience and efficiency. Instead, this paper intends to explore the relationship between learning to develop VR applications and personal development in the 21st century skill. As an umbrella term, the 21st century skill includes a set of skills that are believed to be essential for a work-ready graduate, such as problem-solving skills, IT literacy, and communication skills. It is believed that equipping students with these skills in institutes can make them be competitive and fit the expectation of the job market. As an ethnographic study on teaching university students from different majors to develop their own VR applications in industry-standard software, Unreal Engine, we are going to explore the linkage between learning to making VR and 21st century skill. Qualitative feedbacks (from questionnaires) and detailed discussion (focus group) are primary sources for this study. As the result, it shows that through learning to develop VR applications, university students can equip a certain type of 21st century skills, such as problem-solving and critical thinking.