Multi-Party Mixed Reality Interaction for Earth Sciences Education

Collaborative learning has been shown to be beneficial for children's learning performance, increasing the curiosity and intensity of the ability of cooperation. Mixed-Reality with collaborative learning is the trending research topic in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area. Additionally, with the rise of attention to global warming which brings in more extreme weather and climate conditions, the earth science education would be one of the crucial topics for the next generation. Moreover, there are few augmented reality and mixed reality applications on earth science subject. In this paper, we propose a Mixed Reality Tornado Simulator which offers an earth science education in a collaborative setting. Students and the instructor can cooperate on learning the knowledge of the formation and its damage cause on human-built structures, farming, and vegetation by using our mixed reality application with the Microsoft HoloLens. Also, for evaluating the learning performance in this mixed reality setting, we propose to study the cognitive load while the student is learning the abstract knowledge in Earth Science. We will separate the student into a control group and experimental groups and use different teaching instruments to test the difference of cognitive load.