  Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in using Virtual Reality (VR)
technology to benefit instruction, especially in physics and related subjects.
As VR devices improve and become more widely available, there remains a number
of unanswered questions regarding the impact of VR on student learning and how
best to use this technology in the classroom. On the topic of electrostatics,
for example, a large, controlled, randomized study performed by Smith et al.
2017\cite{smith17}, found that VR-based instruction had an overall negligible
impact on student learning compared to videos or images. However, they did find
a strong trend for students who reported frequent video game play to learn
better from VR than other media. One possible interpretation of this result is
that extended videogame play provides a kind of "training" that enables a
student to learn more comfortably in the virtual environment. In the present
work we consider if a VR training activity that is unrelated to electrostatics
can help prepare students to learn electrostatics from subsequent VR
instruction. We find that preliminary VR training leads to a small but
statistically significant improvement in student performance on our
electrostatics assessment. We also find that student reported game play is
still correlated with higher scores on this metric.
