SA schools to teach students how to create VR projects

Schools in SA are investing big into the latest tech revolution and it's issuing a challenge to teachers to find a way to make VR pay off in the classroom.

School students in future may be able to hand in their projects on virtual reality platforms to demonstrate they really know their stuff.

Three South Australian schools will teach students to create content in virtual reality, rather than just use the technology, in a project next year.

Pembroke, Trinity College and SEDA College will work with Newcastle University and a virtual reality company in what researchers believe is the first project in the world to run a year-long classroom trial.

The project, Students Create Virtual Worlds for Learning, has been initiated by the Association of Independent Schools SA.

“Schools are investing in VR technology but there is limited evidence on how teachers can use this technology to accelerate student learning,” chief executive Carolyn Grantskalns said.

The software developed by Sydney company VRTY will allow students to take a 360-degree image and then drag and drop content into the picture.

This could be videos, sound bites, text, graphics or more images.

A key aspect is that students will not need to learn complex coding.

“This makes it accessible for all students to tell their learning story in VR sophisticated ways,” Newcastle associate professor Erica Southgate said.

“The result could be an alternative to an essay or other presentations of work and it can easily be shared with others.”

Trinity College maths teacher Hannah Sanders helps year 8 student Mia with a virtual reality headset.

In a trial at Trinity College, year 8 students filmed and examined their school playground as part of science and maths.

They labelled and described the playground, identifying different forms of energy such as gravitational, potential, kinetic, electrical, thermal, and so on – and prepared a VR presentation for the year 6s.

“This will really help to develop and embed science, technology, engineering and maths skills,” head of Trinity College Nick Hately said.

He expects students to develop skills “which they can apply in a whole host of problem-solving contexts”.

SEDA College has highly advanced sport programs and hopes the VR options will facilitate learning such as tagging and explaining game play visually.

Pembroke principal Luke Thomson said it would create opportunities to engage with industry.

Ms Grantskalns said AISSA wanted to share the results of the project.

“We want the results to be of value to education providers generally,” she said.

“We think having students create content will be a significant difference but it’s important not to make an assumption – we want to make sure the data is there on whether students learn effectively.”