# VR as an Innovative Learning Tool in Sports Education
## 2 Materials and Method
### Procedure  
Each student performed the VR rotation task on the same day in the gymnasium of the secondary school. The subjects were tested individually one after the other and all the participants performed the task under the same conditions. Throughout the testing procedure, the students were accompanied by two test leaders, i.e., the teacher of the extracurricular dance class and a sports scientist. First, a demographics questionnaire was administered, which enquired about the participants' age and gender as well as their primary compositional sports type, performance level within this sport, training frequency, exercise period in years, level of experience with rotation training, specification of the rotation direction in training, and finally, experience with mental rotation tasks. The experience-based question was answered on a three-point scale ranging from 1 = \"a lot of experience\", 2 = \"little experience\", to 3 = \"no experience\". Furthermore, the students were asked to conduct three simple motor tasks, (e.g., please jump from a standing position into half a rotation) in order to find out each individual's rotation preference, and fill out the Revised Lateral Preference Inventory [31] on eyedness, eardness, handedness, and footedness. Although this repository is not essential to the scope of this work, it can be useful in further research. After completing the questionnaires, participants underwent the actual task. To conduct the VR rotation task, the respective participant had to decide during the rotation of his or her own body in which direction the avatar shown in the VR glasses rotated. From a total of 32 trials, i.e., the amount of rotations, in 16 trials the rotation directions of the turntable and the avatar were congruent (both to the left or both to the right), and in 16 trials the rotation directions of the turntable and the avatar were incongruent (passive body rotation to the right and rotation of the avatar to the left and vice versa). In the context of various research possibilities, this serves--especially from an Embodied-Cognition-Perspective, which states that body and mind are interrelated [32; 33] --to study the effects of congruent rotations (real and mental rotation with the same direction of rotation) and incongruent rotations (real and mental rotation with different directions of rotation) on decision processes. The decision of the rotation direction of the VR avatar had to be made by pressing a button accordingly on the left or the right hand-controller. As soon as the participants did so, both the turntable and the avatar stopped rotating. This was done in order to give the participants a short break before the subsequent trial started after two seconds. In general, performance-related investigations, i.e., the reaction times and the number of errors of a learners' decisions, can be measured by this method as well, which, however, will not be discussed further in this work as the focus was on the students' reports about the tool as well as on the observations of students' subsequent actions. Figure 1 shows the experimental setup of the VR rotation task and the starting position of the VR avatar that the students got to see in the beginning of each trial. Following the task, an additional test using the VR glasses was performed without the students having to stand on the turntable. This was to determine differences with and without rotation of the own body in the context of the performance-related investigations (reaction times and number of errors), which, however, as mentioned, is not referred to in this work. Nevertheless, it is important to mention in the context of this work that the students were presented with the visualization in the VR glasses twice, i.e., 2 \(\times\) 32 trials. After each student completed the tasks, he or she was asked to take part in a feedback session with one of the test leaders.