VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY TO EXPLOIT STEM-SKILLS-BASED LEARNING FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS USING THE TEC21 EDUCATIONAL MODEL

Abstract

The worldwide confinement due to Covid19 has boosted creativity in academia to develop learning activities with role-playing games and multidisciplinary workshops brought to our students' homes. Tecnologico de Monterrey, like most universities in the world, is delivering classes remotely using internally developed and external platforms designed to continue the practices that were done every day in laboratories, facilities, and visits to companies and institutions. This document describes the migration of academic activities, designed under the university's Tec21 Educational Model guidelines, to an internet platform that adopts virtual and augmented reality to deliver learning with the same academic quality as the traditional face-to-face classes. Our training partners in industry, government, and not-for-profit organizations can communicate and access the practice activities on the virtual platforms. The Tecnologico de Monterrey School of Engineering and Design has worked to generate a simulator of an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system based on the educational platform ‘Tec21 Car Assembler.’ Using virtual reality, the student can apply the virtual classroom's theoretical learning to practice, guided by an academic figure who collaborates with training partners from companies and institutions associated with Tecnologico de Monterrey to transfer knowledge to students. Through virtual and augmented reality, the students have been able to interact with the scale car assembly through the EON XR platform, where teachers have designed different lessons based on car assemblies and subassemblies, in this case, Jeep. We are developing our own platform for assembling Meccano designs that can be made by students first using second and third simulations until they can be taken to assembly, using augmented reality and finally, virtual reality.