Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

How VR Could Revolutionize Education

How VR Could Revolutionize Education

NASA, in conjunction with Microsoft, has released a beautiful AR (augmented reality title) with HoloLens called Destination: Mars . It’s not a game, rather it is more like an extremely interactive science exhibit. It got me thinking, VR and AR could be a great teaching tool in future classrooms. Millennials are often visual learners, and what better tool than VR or AR for regular subjects like English, science, and social studies?

For English, novels could come to life and analysis could take on a whole new level. A common pain to most high school students, Shakespeare, could turn into an interactive world on the Elizabethan stage. Watching Kenneth Branagh spit out the most famous speech in Hamlet would not have to be the only delivery students could hear. Learning Shakespeare’s saucy language would be achieved though interacting with the story’s world itself and understanding through sight and sound.

What better way to understand Shakespeare than on the stage with the actors themselves? The immersion VR provides could allow for a level of detailed context that a teacher would never have time to teach: how the stage is set, the actors’ dress, the audience, and the theatre itself. We could even play with Shakespeare (and other classic forms of literature) through the world of VR and the imagination of gaming. Indeed, a Telltale game based on any of the Shakespeare plays would certainly allow for a far more intimate understanding of the language and time period.

For the subject of science, well, what better way to learn how to break down chemical equations than by playing with the molecular models themselves? Or understand the intricacies of the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion by rendering a copy for the students to interact with? From the perspective of Earth, students could slow down or speed up the motion of planets to see how Ptolemy himself happened upon retrograde motion. Rather than simply looking at a diagram in a textbook, students can actually manipulate models and watch theories in action.

How VR Could Revolutionize Education

Social studies is where a game series like Call of Duty could be extremely educational. A game that reenacts historical events, like the World Wars, with the player as a fictional character or actual person from the appropriate time period is a great teaching tool. Why, even Assassin’s Creed Unity could be reworked to include more accurate historical details to better immerse the students. Playing the part of a Templar could be used to teach how different types of governments function, from monarchy to democracy. In such cases, however, I would imagine parents would have issues with such detail being shown to their children; another topic for another time.

VR and AR would be an amazing learning tool in classrooms, with games, interactive models, and novels on stage. The immersion would help students learn hands-on the particularities of everything they are learning in a variety of core subjects, and AR/VR games could be right there as one way to make learning fun.

To top