Comparative Evaluation of EduClust and Its Transfer to a Virtual Reality Environment

Previous research successfully demonstrated the applicability and usefulness of EduClust, a web platform for understanding and learning clustering algorithms. This paper presents a quantitative evaluation of the educational framework, comparing the online teaching platform to traditional teaching material. Results of the conducted experiment in a real computer science course at the University of Konstanz demonstrate its merit concerning users’ confidence and perceived usefulness. Additionally, we dare a first try to exploit the potential social, perceptual, and motivational benefits of immersive media. We present VRClust, an initial prototype as the transfer of the web-based application to a virtual reality environment.