This update is from Pembroke School in Adelaide. Ella Camporeale, Assistant Head of Design and Technology and teacher on the VR study, explains how she has developed a unit of work which integrates student 360° VR content creation for her Year 9 Digital Design class:
“I have developed a Semester-long course for my Year 9 Digital Design class using VR as a form of new media for students to demonstrate knowledge about sustainability and to educate others in the school community about this. The learning outcomes from the Australian Curriculum are aligned with the Technologies Learning Area, Year 9 and 10 band. Specifically, the outcomes relate to developing mastery of digital technology, design thinking and digital solutions.
I am dividing the units of work into three topics. We are looking at sustainability more broadly, data on sustainability in the Middle School and the VR project which will allow students to work in groups to create a virtual reality environment on a topic related to sustainability. The data on sustainability we collect will be integrated into the VR component.
We have been looking at the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of sustainable practice in the Middle School. This is all leading into the pitch the students will be giving for their VR project. We will narrow this down so groups of students work on a specific topic on sustainability in which they will develop their VR environment. Topics will be green space, water, waste, recycling, energy and materials. We hope to amalgamate the VR scenes each group creates to make a single educational resource on sustainability at school.
Students will undertake a brainstorming activity on how they would like their VR project to look. It may be that they produce a story and develop a more gamified interface with characters designed as markers in the VR scene, it may be an education tool, or produced as a systems pitch. After brainstorming, students will start data collection, setting up interviews and surveys for key school stakeholders. This will allow them to gather and visualise data which will eventually be integrated into their VR project. Finally, students will storyboard and plan the VR component of the project, using a similar process as would be undertaken if using other digital media such as video or animation.
Processes of reflection and iteration will be important as students’ progress through each unit in the project, both in groups and individually.”
Stay tuned for more updates from Pembroke School on their VR journey in 2022.
In late August 2021, the VR School study celebrated 5 years of ground-breaking research. Associate Professor Erica Southgate highlights three key findings from research so far:
Research papers and teaching resources are available on the VR School website under the Resources tab and there is a book for those who are interested:
How do children go about planning the content and experiences of virtual environments that they are creating to demonstrate learning mastery? How do they think about creating virtual environments for their peers to learn in? What are the special learning outcomes related to this? Not much is known about these areas.
The VR School Study is interested in students as virtual environment content creators. As part of the research, we collected data on the approaches students take when creating their own virtual worlds to demonstrate mastery of learning. This blog reports on interesting findings from the Athelstone School Innovative Languages project where primary (elementary) aged children are building their own 360° virtual tours to demonstrate mastery of the Italian language.
The students are using VRTY, a platform that allows them to plan and create their virtual worlds without needed to code. The platform provides easy-to-use tools with built in tutorials and a fun guide so that students can independently learn to use the platform after a couple of formal training sessions. Previous blog posts describe the VRTY platform and how it is leveraged through the teacher’s curriculum design. The first step, after training, is for students to research and plan their virtual tour. The planning involves storyboarding through VRTY. Students need to:
Locate and choose the 360° photo scenes of Italy that best fit a tour narrative.
Locate cultural and historical images that could be embedded in each scene.
Create their own content to embed in the scene such as text and sound file that draw on the vocabulary mandated and reflect their research on cultural and historical information about Italy.
Design a narrative through storyboarding in VRTY that reflects the story they want to tell and consider whether the tour experience should be linear or non-linear (the image below is of one student’s storyboard).
Create each 360° scene and embed their content into it in an engaging way and place teleporter hotspots in the scenes so those experiencing the tour can move between scenes.
Fourteen students from a mixed ability class chose to be part of the project with 11 virtual worlds in total created – some students chose to work in pairs. Equal numbers of boys and girls participated. On average student virtual worlds comprised six 360° scenes. Overall, students created 187 pieces of content to embed in scenes in their virtual worlds, including 50 sound files and 137 information markers. The cover image to this blog post is a screen shot from the student tour ‘Journey around Rome’ which shows student created information and sound markers embedded into the scene.
Interestingly, 7 of the 11 worlds were structured according to a non-linear narrative. Non-linear narratives allowed those experiencing the tour to move back and forth between all or most 360° scenes. Students who developed a non-linear narrative storyboard explained that this allowed have the freedom to go back and check out aspects of a scene they might have missed or enjoyed. The image below is of a non-linear narrative storyboard developed in VRTY. The virtual tour was created by a female student who called it ‘Journey around Rome’ and it allowed the traveler to move between a number of historic sites with all sorts of images, text and sound files in English and Italian embedded into them which used the mandated vocabulary and other Italian. Best still the traveler could return to a hotel room and decide which day trip they might take next or they could go back and visit somewhere they had already been.
The storyboard in VRTY for ‘Tour Around Rome’ illustrates the non-linear narrative created by the students with arrow indicating the direction of travel that was possible between 360° scenes.
This sophisticated non-linear narrative approach to constructing a user experience was premised on creating a sense of agency for those experiencing the tour (or other learners). In choosing non-linear narratives some children were tapping into the strength of developing learner agency when designing their virtual worlds. Non-linear narratives were not essential for developing agency but, in many cases, were important to this.
The significance of developing agency in learning cannot be underestimated, as Williams (2017) explains:
“Students with agency develop a self-perception that is based on their abilities as independent thinkers. Our task as educators is not to tell them what to think but to help reveal their thinking by reflecting back to them what we are observing and noticing and naming their acts of problem solving. This feedback builds a metacognitive awareness that reinforces their identities as capable thinkers who are able to construct their own understandings. This mode of learning shifts the locus of power from the teacher to the student, thus setting up students as the experts in their own learning.” (p. 11).
The Athelstone School VR project illustrates how many students themselves understand the significance of agency in creating engaging and efficacious 360° learning environments.
Reference
Williams, P. (2017). Student Agency for Powerful Learning. Knowledge Quest, 45(4), 8-15.
“I have developed a Semester-long course for my Year 9 Digital Design class using VR as a form of new media for students to demonstrate knowledge about sustainability and to educate others in the school community about this. The learning outcomes from the Australian Curriculum are aligned with the Technologies Learning Area, Year 9 and 10 band. Specifically, the outcomes relate to developing mastery of digital technology, design thinking and digital solutions. 
VR School 