Effects of different haptic modalities on students´ understanding of physical phenomena

This paper describes investigation on the effectiveness of the haptic feedback in science education, involving 8th grade middle school students. For that study haptically enhanced presentations of the Coriolis Effect have been created based on MPEG-4 framework allowing creating, transmitting and displaying haptically enhanced multimedia educational contents. A special focus of the work is the comparison of the effect of different modalities - i.e. audiovisual feedback only, audiovisual feedback with tactile feedback and audiovisual feedback with kinesthetic feedback - on the learning. The result showed that multimedia contents including haptic feedback can improve student understanding of the Coriolis Effect better than when only the audiovisual feedback content was provided. However, there was no significant difference between tactile and kinesthetic modalities.