An Interactive Virtual Environment for Teaching "Triangulations and Coordinates Calculations" to Surveying Students

This paper presents ongoing research aimed at improving surveying education through the use of virtual environments. Teaching surveying presents several challenges such as low student competence in mathematics, geometry and trigonometry, limited student access to instruments, limited availability of terrains on which to practice, dependency on weather conditions, and more. Prior research suggests that surveying education can be significantly improved with the use of digital teaching aids and virtual instruments. The goal of the work reported in the paper is to enhance traditional surveying instruction methods with a unique approach: an interactive Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that supports students’ mathematical representational fluency and includes realistic virtual terrains and surveying instruments that look, operate, and produce results comparable to the physical ones. The VLE is aimed at undergraduate students enrolled in Civil Engineering, Architecture and Building Construction Management programs and includes 5 educational modules; in this paper we describe the design, development and initial evaluation of the “Triangulations and Coordinates Calculations” module. KeywordsVirtual Learning Environments; Surveying Education; Usability Evaluation