News

Actions

The future of education? Chandler View students learn augmented and virtual reality

Posted at 1:58 PM, Feb 09, 2017
and last updated 2017-06-06 14:43:36-04

Many schools are making a big push for STEM and STEAM.

 At the elementary school level of education, one school is combining those skills with lessons that makes learning lessons and facts more playful adventurous for students.

At Chandler View Elementary in Omaha Public Schools.

A pair of goggles is a ticket to an educational adventure.

While these kids can't necessarily pronounce some words.

The HoloLens are showing these students augmented and virtual reality.

Virtual reality, most of us are familiar with, you put on the glasses and taken to a completely different place.

"It could be that they're going under the ocean or maybe they're looking at the pyramids of Egypt," said Eileen Heller, an OPS Instructional Technology Trainer.

Augmented reality is a mix between what's real, and virtual reality.

Content can be accessed by scanning or viewing a trigger image that creates a subsequent action. This action can be a video, another image, 3d animations, games, QR code, you get the picture.

"You walk in you had like a little kind of glasses type and when you walk there's a little Astronaut right here and if you press on it it goes like hello" said Angelina Lerma, a fourth grader at OPS.

Programmers built lessons into the objects the students encountered.

"They added them before we could use them and so we could see them," said student Yahir Lopez.

"When you walk over here there's a planet it has rings and has two moons."

The process is boasted as transformational and engaging, especially for visual learners. But educators do prepare for possible side effects for kids trying AR and VR for the first time.

"There are some very real very real filling experiences that they might have that might bring up some emotional things in the past,” said Heller.

“It could be a natural exasperate that they are experiencing inside it it might be something that triggers emotions that they maybe wouldn't be prepared for so you have to be mindful of that." Eileen Heller

All of this, as we get a glimpse of the future of education.