Recording traces to monitor learners’ activity during lab work sessions in a virtual reality environment

This work is part of a project which intends to build a virtual work surface for lab work. Our aim is to monitor and analyse learner’s activity in such environments in order to model it and to improve learning. Virtual Reality allows a lot of various activities to take place, leading to a high amount of observables. We proposed an environment for detecting and recording traces needed to analyze the learners’ activity. We also detailed a model which enables the identification of learners’ actions and processes. The virtual work surface has been built using Mascaret. In this virtual environment for learning, each object, action and event is an instance of a formal meta-model. This model allows us to formally define every observable corresponding to the traces. This study points out the specificities of trace analysis regarding lab work in virtual reality