Using Digital Tools for Studying About and Addressing Climate Change

Grounded in research-based examples, this chapter provides a resource for students, teachers, and researchers to critically engage with issues of climate change through leveraging the affordances of digital tools. In particular, the authors discuss the affordances and challenges of students using digital tools to address climate change. They also review research in this field, including studies on visualizations, analyzing information, social media, digital videos, digital role-play, video games, and virtual and augmented reality. The chapter describes how digital tools offer meaning-making possibilities for students to propose solutions to climate change through engaging multimodal narratives, as well as share their voices through digital activism. Considering that global climate change is perhaps the most serious problem human beings have ever faced, this chapter offers implications for curriculum and instruction to aid educators with designing digital projects for students to understand climate change and find ways to take a stand.

Cognitive Performance in Immersive Environments After Acquired Brain Injury

The use of immersive environments such as virtual and augmented reality is quickly developing. For cognitive assessment and training in a neuropsychological setting, this offers a perspective for innovation and improvement of existing methods. Most of the current clinical uses of immersive environments focus on factors such as anxiety, or motor activities for physical therapy. Cognitive applications, concerning, for example, memory, attention, visuospatial processing, are relatively scarce. In this chapter, considerations of using immersive environments for cognitive purposes are presented. In addition to immersion, the individual experience of immersive environments, as expressed by sense of presence, will be discussed. By examining advantages and disadvantages of using immersive environments to measure and train cognitive performance, recommendations for clinical use of these methods are provided.

Virtual and Augmented Reality Awareness Tools for Universal Design

This chapter will be focused on contributing to the increase of universal design competencies of future engineers, educators, and designers through the use of mixed reality technologies, closing the gap between theory and field application of principles, towards a more inclusive world and promoting health and wellbeing for all. The experience of a situation where limitations arise in relation to what is taken for granted is an important experience that leads to a personal knowledge of the difficulties. By the use of simulators, especially virtual (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies, it is possible to create such experiences. Training based on MR can prepare future and current professionals for up-to-date requirements of the labor market. In addition, it can ensure that the standards such as barrier-free concepts, broader accessibility, adaptive and assistive technology will be familiar to trainees.

Impacts of the Application of Virtual and Augmented Reality on Teaching-Learning Processes in Engineering Courses

Cognitive approaches to teaching generate learning through the interaction between the subject and object of study. One of the strategies to create this interaction is related to the application of virtual and augmented reality in the teaching-learning processes. Through a systematic literature review, this work aims to describe the approaches used to measure the impacts on student learning who used virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the teaching-learning processes of engineering courses, the impacts on learning, and student satisfaction. The surveys showed that 70% of research analyzed, students who used virtual reality or augmented reality learned more, and 90% of the research described that students who used virtual or augmented reality were more satisfied with the new approach than the traditional teaching approach. The conclusion is that there are positive impacts, in the vast majority of cases, on learning and the satisfaction of students who use virtual or augmented reality in the teaching-learning processes applied in engineering courses.

Application of Virtual/Augmented Reality in Surgical Procedures

This chapter seeks to explore from the reflexivity approach the current state of virtual and augmented technologies in various surgical procedures, analyzing the most relevant technological progress as well as the latest practical applications that have been developed. Bibliographic, documentary, and descriptive were the methodologies of research; the information was collected from various scientific articles from indexed journals and websites, using keywords such as “virtual reality,” “augmented reality,” and “surgical procedure” in search engines. Furthermore, technological progress in various branches that include surgery is explored in this chapter, which is focused on the research and technology application of virtual and augmented reality as well as the challenges.

Usability and Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality in Older Adults

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been explored to be an effective alternative to integrating mental health intervention proposals, particularly in eldercare. The objective is to map the usability and applications of VR and AR technologies in interventions for the elderly population. The main areas of interventions in AR and VR applied to the elderly are stimulation and cognitive rehabilitation, physical rehabilitation, treatment of mental diseases, and promotion of quality of life. Despite the need for further studies, VR and AR have strong adherence among the elderly and demonstrate promising potential in interventions that seek to promote mental health and improve the quality of life.