Have Fun with Math: Multimodal, Interactive, and Immersive Exploration of Wave Functions with 3D Models

Postsecondary STEM courses include substantial mathematics and algorithms. Students need motivation to dig deep into the topic. Multisensory modeling allows users to explore objects with multiple senses, i.e., audio, visual, and touch. If augmented with virtual reality (VR), the overall experience could be more immersive and enjoyable. This research investigated students’ experience with unimodal versus multimodal visualization and exploration of wave functions with and without VR integration. Students interactively explored wave functions, i.e., sine, cosine, sawtooth, square, and triangular waves, with 3D models to concretize understanding of wave parameters, i.e., frequency, amplitude, phase, and vertical shifts. Initial findings showed that students preferred the audio-visual exploration of wave functions over the visual-only version in VR-enhanced and non-VR platforms. Overall, VR enriched their experience while interacting with the data.