Student Engagement
Perhaps the biggest issue teachers face today is student engagement.
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In today’s digital world, finding new ways to engage tech-savvy students is ever more difficult. When cell phones and games consoles are highly advanced and hugely popular, engagement with technology in the classroom can be difficult. We can all agree that the technology deployed in schools is less engaging than the technology kids use at home.
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Educators face major challenges in keeping students actively engaged and interested in material. Schools are generally still ensnared by traditional transmissionist methods such as lectures, leading to disinterested, disengaged students.
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Virtual Learning is an effort to make learning more effective, relevant, and engaging to today’s 3D videogame-saturated kids. The National Science Foundation concludes “as a general principle VR improves learning; when it does, by providing the learners with new, direct experiences of phenomena they could not have experienced before, either in direct interaction with the real world or using other technologies.”
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Virtual learning is a process that has student learning at its center, designed to be a first reference for new ideas. Research has found that students performed better when they were in control of their navigation through the virtual learning environment, just as in the videogames they love so much.
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SUNRISE seeks to help parents and educators keep students actively engaged in schoolwork. A child can learn anything when they have full control over exploration in information-rich 3D environments. Real time 3D programs provide unlimited choices for students. Students can fly, drive, swim, or walk anywhere and the number of possible combinations of real-time interactive choices available are infinite. This is true while exploring the Covid-19 virus, the US Constitution, or the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Learning Technology Students Want
This is the first generation to grow up digital, coming of age in a world where computers, the Internet, video games, and cell phones are common, and where expressing themselves through these tools is the norm. Given how embedded these technologies are in their lives, do young people act, think and learn differently today? And what are the implications for education?”
Jonathan Fanton President, MacArthur Foundation
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“ 85 percent of children prefer to learn by seeing and doing and with three dimensional technology“
Learning in Future Education, Anne Bamford, International Research Agency
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It is a common refrain that new technologies bring new societal advances- but there is an important caveat- only if leveraged correctly. Unfortunately, to date the promise and engagement of 3D technologies and visualization tools have been the exclusive domain of games and entertainment. Great movies are enjoyed and great games are played, but great minds are not stimulated. There is clearly a great unfulfilled promise in the learning potential of these powerful technologies.
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Kids today are different.
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Technology is everywhere, driving our home life, community life, and work life. Yet learning always seems to lag far behind the technology curve. The classroom is the one facet of our society that would be easily recognized by a visitor from the 19th Century.
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Outside school, kids have access to PCs, laptops, videogames, smartphones, texting, social networking, and video. Because of the disconnect between school life and non-school life, quite simply, many kids are bored in school. The Lucas Foundation reports: “Teachers in every strata of education are increasingly dealing with a student population that is not only more wired than they are but also grew up in a techno-drenched atmosphere that has trained them to absorb and process information in fundamentally different ways.”
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Kids today are different. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Today’s youth get news online, make online purchases, and create their own content for the Internet.”
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The New Possibilities
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Faced with the challenge of engaging students who think in fundamentally different ways than previous generations, parents and educators need the appropriate new tools to engage these new minds. Virtual learning is an effort to make learning more relevant and engaging to today’s technology-savvy kids. The Center for Educational Technology reports “With the help of three-dimensional graphics software, educators are building a new visual language that bridges the gap between the concrete world of nature and the abstract world of concepts and models.”
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The National Science Foundation (NSF), concludes “as a general principle that VR improves learning; when it does, by providing the learners with new, direct experiences of phenomena they could not have experienced before, either in direct interaction with the real world or using other technologies.
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Learning is much more effective when it is an active discovery process. Virtual learning gives children on demand access to powerful scientific visualization systems based on their schoolwork. Kids enter a simulation of Ancient Egypt or the Human Cell. This type of exploration-based engaged learning is a powerful learning experience. As a supplement to traditional schoolwork, it helps kids to understand abstract or complex issues.
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Most telling, students prefer to learn in virtual environments. Dr. Anne Bamford, Director of the International Research Agency, led a massive study in 7 countries that involved hundreds of students aged 10-13. They concluded that 85 percent of children prefer to learn by seeing and doing and with three dimensional technology. The question now is whether educators will provide them with these learning tools.
Virtual learning is challenging assumptions about how we can learn, and may even signal a fundamental shift in the possibilities of learning. At its core, it is about creating new models of understanding and educational excellence. It is about taking the best of existing educational pedagogy and pairing it with the world’s most powerful visualization tools, the tools students prefer to interact with.