Paper presentation Virtual Reality for Immersive Student Motivation more

Sun, Jun 19, 10:00-10:30 Asia/Tokyo

Games for motivation have been used tirelessly in ESL. These games are specifically designed as educational tools first and secondary as games. It is the presenter’s intention to show a reverse of this, where a non-educational VR game if used to motivate students, could promote a vision of one’s ideal self, and subsequently motivate one to work toward or become their ideal self. In the article “The Ideal Self at Play: The Appeal of Video Games that Let You Be All You Can Be” (2012) it is shown that highly immersive gaming such as VR was intrinsically motivating to players. The more immersion the game had, the closer the player felt to their ideal self (character). The purpose of this presentation is to show that immersion in gaming has the potential to create an image of an ideal self in the student player which then would motivate the student to imitate and become the ideal self. In the presentation, the presenter will demonstrate that students are increasingly motivated through gaming with results from a Likert Scale survey from 111 first and second-year students in four separate agricultural departments at Akita Prefectural University. Two questions were the focus of this research: 1. Are students motivated in their lives and identify with game characters or game stories? 2. Could gaming be used to inspire students to learn a Foreign language? The students in majority answered that they both identify and are motivated by gaming as well as believe that gaming could be used to inspire learning English as a Foreign Language. To build on this the presenter will use the Self-Determination Theory to explain why students in the survey felt intrinsically motivated by gaming. Finally using virtual reality to demonstrate, the presenter will show that highly immersive VR gaming technology can be incredibly motivating to converge the real self and ideal self in students.