Preschoolers' entrance to elementary school marks a major change in their lives, which may cause difficulties in adjusting to school, such as anxiety and refusal to attend. Accordingly, there is a need for school adaptation content for preschoolers before entering school. We developed a VR game that provides a classroom experience simulation with four different tasks for preschoolers before entering school. We conducted a formative evaluation on the game with 16 participants (5 males, 11 females, mean age: 22.25) of different ages to measure usability, presence and cybersickness. The results indicated that the game has adequate usability (SUS score: 80.88/90; PSSUQ mean: 3.44), with some issues related to quality of instructions, clarity of the user interface, and technical issues. Moreover, most of the participants were able to sense presence (involvement mean: 5.87; adaptation/immersion mean: 6.16), but 43.7% of them reported symptoms of cybersickness. The results of the study play a pioneering role in future work on development of immersive school adaption interventions. Therefore, the study can be of interest to researchers, developers and teachers who are interested in the area.
This research was supported by the New Faculty Research Fund of Ajou University and the MIST (Ministry of Science, ICT), Korea, under the National Program for Excellence in SW), supervised by the IITP (Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation) in 2022.
