ENHANCING LEARNING EXPERIENCE OF CHILDREN WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENTS WHEN EXPOSED TO NEWTON SEALIFE VIRTUAL REALITY APPLICATION Marilena Bratu 1 , Dorothea Caraman 2 , Mihaela Garabet 2 , Ioana Ghergulescu 3 , Cristina Hava Muntean 4 1 University of Bucharest (ROMANIA) 2 SIVECO (ROMANIA) 3 Adaptemy (IRELAND) 4 National College of Ireland (IRELAND) Abstract There is an increasing interest in offering rich educational content not only to students with typical development, but also to students with special educational needs. This paper demonstrates the benefit of using Sealife – a Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Lab (VL) application in terms of learning experience when deployed to children with hearing impairments. The Sealife application consists of two parts: a 3D immersive computer-based VR and a VL simulation. For each sea creature introduced in the first part of the application there is a nature VR environment, and learners are asked to search for the animals in their own environment and learn different facts related to them. In the second part of the application, the learners are exposed to a VL environment that provides a 3D view of the animals and additional educational information related to them. Results of a pilot study deployed in St. Maria School from Bucharest, Romania, involving 30 secondary school students with hearing impairments are presented in this paper. Children learning satisfaction was assessed using a motivation and affective state questionnaire. The analysis of the results demonstrated a significant improvement in the motivational and affective state of the children in terms of interest in STEM subjects, self-confidence and enjoyment. Keywords: Virtual Reality, Virtual Labs, Technology-Enhanced Learning, Students with Hearing Impairments. 1 INTRODUCTION Recently, the school activities focus not only on acquiring knowledge but also on creating a pleasant and attractive learning environment. Most of the time, learning STEM topics is not associated with a positive affective state. Many students show anxiety over these topics and consequently the motivation to study STEM subjects decreases. Often teachers are in the position to seek new ways to motivate students to learn science, technology and mathematics Emotional experiences and motivation are deeply involved in all learning processes influencing attention [1], memory [2], reasoning [3] and problem solving activities [4] etc. Identifying solutions to improve learner affective state and to motivate him/her during the class sessions is the key element for an effective learning. In this respect, the EU Horizon 2020-funded NEWTON project focuses on integrate innovative pedagogical learning approaches and technology enhanced learning (TEL) materials in order to stimulate learners’ motivation and affective state during lessons, encourage their engagement and improve learning outcomes [15, 16, 17]. NEWTON Project educational material is distributed through its platform - NEWTELP. This platform provides courses as well as assessments from multiple angles, such as knowledge gain, usability and affective state [5]. NEWTELP platform provides educational materials and integrates diverse novel technologies in education including adaptive multimedia and multi-sensorial media [10, 14, 18, 19], personalization [20], virtual labs and fab labs [10, 12, 20]. This paper analyzes learners’ motivation and affective state after the use of the VR-VL Sealife application, as part of Earth Course NEWTON large scale STEM education pilot that was carried out in ”Sfanta Maria” school - a special vocational school from Bucharest, Romania for students with hearing impairments A total number of 30 students participated in this case study. Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference 1st-3rd July 2019, Palma, Mallorca, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4 6519