This study examined students' experiences with mixed-reality applications and physical toolkits in Engineering Mechanics to inform design guidelines for educational tools. In a user study with 24 participants, we compared classroom instruction alone, classroom instruction with a mixed-reality application, and classroom instruction with physical toolkits. Thematic analysis of participant feedback revealed that learners' workflows and engagement with fundamental mechanics problems varied across instructional modalities. Participants valued multimodal and interactive experiences that combined visualization with hands-on interaction, while reporting challenges with complex or unclear visualizations. These insights support the human-centered design of mixed-reality and physical tools for engineering education.
Conventional Mixed Reality (MR) workspaces are frequently organized in cockpit-like layouts, where multiple floating windows surround the user. While this configuration facilitates access to digital content, it often induces occlusion, reducing understanding of the physical envir…
Developing conceptual understanding in engineering requires learners to connect spatial reasoning with abstract representations, yet lecture-based instruction often provides limited support for this process. Interactive learning environments, including mixed reality (MR) and tang…
Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embo…
Assessing learning in virtual reality (VR) environments typically relied on traditional pre-post content retention tests, revealing little about the process of learnng within such immersive environments. Multimodal data from player activity in VR is promising to better measure le…
When domain experts create charts, the bottleneck is rarely the data, but knowing the optimal next step in chart design. The visualization design space is vast, and while domain experts can recognize a good design when they see it, it is often challenging to determine the exact p…
User experience (UX) designers face barriers when creating data visualizations due to limited domain expertise in visualization or unfamiliarity with specialized tools. This highlights a clear need for effective methods to build visualization literacy. To address this, we evaluat…