On April 25, 2024, the Institute for Intelligent Interaction and Immersive Experience (IIIX) once again opened its doors to the Girls’ Day. Girls' Day is an initiative to introduce girls and young women to male-dominated professional fields in which the proportion of women is below 40 percent. These primarily include scientific and technical degree courses and professions, including research in the STEM field and most degree courses at the HKA. As part of Girls' Day, the IIIX offered a laboratory tour through the iXperience Lab and then a workshop on virtual reality (VR). The offer met with great interest and was fully booked with 20 participants.
Girls' Day 2024 at IIIX began in the iXperience Lab, the institute's laboratory that offers students the opportunity to experiment with current technologies and implement their own projects. The lab is also used for research and development at the institute. The demonstration of the lab and a brief presentation of previous projects gave the participants an insight into everyday research at IIIX. Our employee Jonas Deuchler reported on the day-to-day work at IIIX, the main research areas and the interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from a wide range of specialist areas.
The lab tour was followed by the main part of Girls' Day with a workshop on VR. In this workshop, the participants were able to create and explore their own learning worlds in VR. They were given a playful introduction to the basics of programming and VR technology. The workshop began with a brief introduction to the CoSpaces app by our employee Darja Stepanova. CoSpaces enables students to create their own digital content and learn programming in a playful way, with the application being able to serve different levels.
The introduction to CoSpaces was followed by a workshop on the design of virtual learning spaces, which was conducted by our employee Fiona Schmidbauer as part of her doctoral thesis. The participants were shown the career path of a doctorate in the STEM field and were given an insight into participating in a research study. The participants constructed their own virtual learning worlds in CoSpaces step by step and then brought them to life with program code by setting objects in motion.
At the end of the workshop, participants tried out their own worlds with VR goggles, taking turns using Meta Quest 2 headsets to explore their environments and present them to each other. The workshop was very well received by the participants. All participants were able to successfully create their own learning worlds and soon began to actively ask questions to implement their ideas in CoSpaces. Although some participants were initially skeptical about the VR glasses, they all eventually overcame their reservations and tried out their own learning worlds in VR.
Working with the girls was also a lot of fun this year. It was an enriching experience to awaken the girls' interest in IT and VR and combine it with a creative task that appealed to everyone. With our Girls' Day offer at IIIX, we want to encourage girls and young women to choose a scientific or technical course of study, possibly even at HKA. Through our female employees, we want to show the way into STEM research and promote the participation of women in research, especially in the STEM field.