A Desktop VR-based HCI framework for programming instruction

Programming skills are becoming increasingly important in both academia and industry. While this signifies numerous opportunities for students, it also inherently involves the challenge of preparing students suitably for these opportunities. Students, especially those at the beginner level, encounter difficulties when learning to program and the lack of efficient tools to overcome such difficulties can affect students' motivation. Over time, this creates to a drastic and negative impact in their attitude towards `learning programming', which is undesirable for student success in engineering education. To rectify this, a suitable approach that can motivate students needs to be developed to change students' mindset towards learning programming. To this end, to facilitate interactive and fun-filled learning, this research employs a learner-centric, user-friendly Virtual Environment (VE) to teach programming concepts. The impact of this research extends beyond engineering and technology education as this framework can serve as a tool to strengthen STEM education and enhance general programming literacy.