Teaching Product Assembly with VR: Advantages, Shortcomings, and Student Perceptions

This study investigates the effectiveness and perceived value of virtual reality (VR) in teaching mechanical assembly tasks to engineering students, comparing immersive training with traditional hands-on practice. The experiment took place during a workshop for students involved in the Erasmus+ XREN project, hosted at Politecnico di Milano technical university. Participants were divided into two groups: one completed the assembly task first in VR and then in real life, while the other completed it in the opposite sequence. Students completed a pre-assessment measuring technical expertise, familiarity with VR, and task-related self-efficacy. After the first training session, they reported perceived competence and completed a short knowledge test. Then, at the end of the second session, students evaluated the perceived usefulness, ease of use, presence, engagement, and overall experience quality of the interaction with the virtual application; finally, they indicated their preferred learning modality. At the end of the study, two focus groups explored subjective perceptions, difficulties, and comparative impressions of the two teaching modes. Quantitative results showed moderate performance levels and substantial variability in execution times, despite initially high self-efficacy, across both teaching methods. VR was evaluated as moderately useful and easy to use, with good presence and high engagement. Qualitative findings highlighted VR’s strengths (novelty, repeatability, safe exploration) and limitations (lack of haptics, reduced realism, limited social interaction). Overall, students favored a blended approach, suggesting that VR is most effective as a complementary tool that supports and enhances hands-on learning rather than a replacement for real-world hands-on activities.