COMPUTING VR CASE STUDY: Creating in CoSpaces (Student Age 5-7)
“Students were exposed to Virtual Reality for the first time during their lesson on ‘Space’. They had the experience of viewing the individual planets and the solar system as a whole in 3D. These experiences facilitated the students to better understand the concept of space. During these lessons one of the students curiously asked, “We are actually not on the moon but how, just using this headset, can we see and feel as if we are on the moon?” This led to explaining what programming is in computer language and made the student even more curious thinking that what he is seeing is actually possible to create.”
Sheela Yadav
Age 5 – 7 Primary School Teacher (UK)
PRACTICAL SESSION
I asked the children to go onto the CoSpaces gallery and explore some of the pre-published creations; in conjunction with this, I also copied some of the links onto the ClassVR Portal, so students could view the example creation via the ClassVR headsets. The students’ ideas of creating space started to change and they wanted to create different worlds with different foci. I gave the VR Club support in getting themselves registered and then, after this point, they were left to explore all the tools they had and how to use them independently. Initially, they were tasked with coding their characters/objects to move and speak. This was challenging for some of them, as one student explained, “I want this witch to speak but it is not working!” students were introduced to the concept of ‘debugging’ and how important it is to check the steps they were taking to perform the desired action. At this point, I asked them to share their unfinished creation with me and I showed their work via a ClassVR headset; they explained why they chose that specific world, how they created it and what they wished to add further. Some students wanted to move two objects at the same time, e.g. a car and the sitting man, a boat and a man standing on it. This was set as their homework to find out how to get two algorithms running concurrently.
IMPACT ON LEARNING
The students learnt how a 3D world can be created and then shared with their peers. They felt that they could be teleported to any world through their imagination and hard work, without having to even leave home/school. They learnt to solve complicated problems through reasoning and that if the sequence in coding is not correct, then the desired action is not accomplished. The use of the headsets provided a platform for the children to publish their work on and enjoy experiencing other children’s work too.
