Using VR as a New Pedagogical Approach for Food Science and Technology Education in Hong Kong

This study proposes "Food Science Academy VR," a virtual reality cooking game designed to teach food science and cookery to junior secondary students in Hong Kong. Its motivation is a documented shortage of qualified staff and resources in the Technology and Living curriculum, where only 430 teachers serve 440 schools and 195 schools lack teachers with relevant training. The authors argue that immersive, hands-on VR simulation can mitigate constraints of safety, facilities, and staffing, drawing on evidence that gamified learning (meta-analytic effect size g ≈ 0.82) and interactive VR tools tend to outperform passive video instruction.

The core investigation is a quasi-experimental comparison between VR gameplay and video recordings of the same egg-based recipes, scaffolded in increasing difficulty. Because the design is small and preliminary, the evidence is qualitative and underpowered. In a pilot with four Grade 7 students, two in the VR condition scored 18.5 and 19 out of 24 overall, compared with 10 and 11 for the two video-condition students. The gap was most pronounced on the written test, where VR learners scored 6.5 to 7 out of 10 against 1 for the video group. The authors acknowledge that the passive video control does not represent typical classroom practice, which limits how directly the comparison maps onto everyday teaching.

Taken together, the findings suggest rather than establish an advantage for VR in procedural and conceptual learning within food science education. The work is situated in a Hong Kong context and draws on curriculum guidance from the Hong Kong Education Bureau, teacher-survey evidence, and recent literature on virtual reality and gamification. Larger controlled studies with active comparison conditions would be needed to confirm the instructional benefits and to assess whether such tools can meaningfully address the subject's staffing gap at scale.