School of Building Construction Chair Ece Erdogmus has a vision for using emerging technologies to make Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and jobs more accessible to students with disabilities.

"If we can bring the construction site to the students, perhaps we will remove some of the barriers to engagement and learning in these disciplines," Erdogmus said.  

Nearly one in five higher education students have a disability and these students have a higher risk of dropping out compared to their peers without disabilities, according to Erdogmus's team's research. The inaccessibility of curriculum and workplace environments discourages these students from pursuing STEM disciplines, resulting in a lack of representation for people with disabilities, she said.

Construction Science and Management may be considered particularly inaccessible to these students, due to the integral nature of job site visits for these majors.  

To make site visits accessible, Erdogmus launched Accessible Construction Education through Virtual/Augmented Reality Discipline Explorations (ACE-VADER) with funding from an Amplify Momentum Project (GT-AMP) grant. ACE-VADER aims to leverage the latest technologies used in Construction Management education — Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR), robotics, and drone-based visual inspections — to create experiential teaching modules for students of all abilities.  

In an educational context, VR makes inaccessible spaces, environments, and objects spatially accessible. It also engages students in ways that aren't possible using non-immersive images or videos, Erdogmus said.

In addition to ACE-VADER, Ben Kreimer, the creative technology consultant on the team, and Erdogmus worked with collaborators from around the U.S. on two other projects, including a $1.7M NSF grant resulting in scalable educational modules for different applications.

"Humans experience and learn about the world in three dimensions," Kreimer said, "and AR/VR mediums are now enabling educators to capture, create, and share accessible 3D and spatial concepts in this human-native 3D format.” 

One of the unique aspects of the ACE-VADER project was developing an interactive virtual site visit. School of Building Construction Ph.D. student Steven Kangisser led the effort with multiple site visits to two different construction projects.

The initial site visit was a single scene with no interactivity. After getting feedback from various Construction Science and Management Students through a class demo (BC 2631), the researchers worked on a much more complex module.

The finalized virtual site visit module showcases the Children’s Hospital complex that is being jointly built by Brasfield & Gorrie and JE Dunn, two large nationally-known general contractors, who also support the School with advisory board membership and other contributions.  The complexity of the project resulted in 360 recordings of various phases of the project. Pre-recorded questions and answers, and avatars, made the site visit further engaging.