Happy New Year!
My name is Elixa Neumann and I live in Vancouver, BC! I have been a teacher in the Burnaby School District since 2016 but am on a leave of absence this year due to the pandemic. I decided to start my masters and explore other career paths in education, other than teaching in the classroom. So now it’s time for this next adventure to begin!
Over the past three years, my side curiosity to teaching has involved the use of Virtual Reality in the classroom. This started with the simple google expeditions in the cardboard boxes, and quickly shift into building games in education for students to develop kinesthetic understanding and simulation memories to help struggling learners in Mathematics. I have encouraged several dozen students to start learning to develop their own VR platforms and games through this as well. Last year, I had an HTC VIVE setup in my grade 6/7 classroom and students were able to explore our curriculum through simulations and games on the kit. I wish I could share with you the looks on the students faces when they stepped out of their first simulation: a tomb in ancient Egypt. Now, I am working with the Burnaby School District to build the “Burnaby Simulation Center” which will feature HTC VIVE kits for individual and cooperative play, alongside a 360-degree Igloo dome for viewing 360 videos. I am working to develop games and applications that teach concepts in Occupational Health and Safety at the moment and our second game is nearly complete.
I am pursuing this master to shift from educating in the classroom to being an innovator or facilitator of developing technologies for schools. Technology never ceases to amaze me: seeing how my students can craft their learning digitally, or stepping into the world of VR, has opened my eyes to an entire new scope of potential learning methods for students. I am not sure where this program will take me in the end, but all I know for now is that it is an amazing opportunity to explore technological possibilities and application in education.
Hi Elixa!
It’s great to know that there’s someone else who loves VR in this class! I always wanted to use it, but I could never figure out how to logistically organize it to maximize play time. I bought a new Oculus Quest 2 just a few weeks ago to play around. I would love to get some tips from you about how to engage students with VR systems!
Absolutely! We can touch base and go over some ideas. I’d be happy to share what I’ve discovered! There are TONS of amazing free simulations and games on Steam for education and learning.
Oh The Quest is good! I’ve been on VR Chat a lot these days exploring the possibilities of collaborative education in this setting, similar to the Oasis from Ready Player One. However, I’m using the HTC Vive and it’s much smoother and accessible for the application. I’m looking at getting the different kinetic sensors soon to see how this changes my experience in VR.
Hi Elixa, that is great! You are travelling a path I have been thinking of travelling as well. Very inspiring. Not sure what my path is yet….. hoping to find it through this program though….
Hi Elixa, good for you taking on the challenge! Our tech ed teacher has brought some VR sets into the school, but they’re not being used very much yet. I would love to see what we can do with VR in science and math, or what students can do to design their own experiences. My step-daughter is a video-game designer in Edmonton and her first job was designing VR simulators for industrial use, so I got to tour her company and try out the VR simulations they made – a very cool experience, though I’m one of the people that gets dizzy using it. I think that it’s great that you want to pursue creating technologies for schools. So much of what we use is not necessarily thought out from the perspective of students or teachers and we end up only using it as a stop-gap until something better comes our way. Looking forward to learning with you.
Hi Elixa!
Wow, your work sounds amazing! I think VR has so much potential in education as well. I didn’t have my first VR experience until early last year, and I was so amazing by it that I asked my husband for an Occulus Quest 2 for Christmas : ) Even though the headset is too big and heavy for my 5 year-old daughter, she still asks to play games in it. I work in the private language tutoring business for ESL students, and I think VR has a huge potential for language learning. Anyways, welcome to the program! I look forward to learning with you.
Emily