An Empirical Study on the Improvement of Design Thinking Ability Based on Virtual Reality Technology

Design thinking has the characteristics of people-oriented and goal-oriented, and it has become an indispensable way of thinking to cultivate innovative talents. Virtual reality technology coincides with the training mode of design thinking with its characteristics of immersion, interactivity and conception. Through the study of existing literature, the researchers learned that virtual reality technology has been widely used in various design courses, but there are few researches applied to design thinking courses. This study explores two questions: "Will virtual reality-based design thinking courses improve students' design thinking ability compared to the control group?", "How would students describe their approach to problem solving in the design thinking course? "In this study, 66 postgraduate students in educational technology were divided into two groups for quasi-experimental study: virtual reality-based design thinking teaching group (n = 33) and conventional design thinking teaching group (n = 33). At the same time, with the help of the design thinking model of Stanford University, the relevant scale is designed, and the data are collected and analyzed in both qualitative and quantitative ways. The experiment shows that learning design thinking course based on virtual reality technology is helpful to improve students' design thinking ability.