What happens when students become VR creators?

Written by Gloria Seo (Head of Immersive Learning)

The CAMIL model, explored in an earlier post, makes the case that VR supports learning best when it is driven by pedagogy, not novelty. Nowhere is that clearer than when students become the creators. So what are students actually learning when they build in VR?

In VR Create, part of the eVR Classroom, students build their own interactive 360° worlds. They film real places, plan the path a visitor will take and add hotspots, narration and questions.

But the learning was never really the software. It is the design process students work through to get there, and it is the same process named in the Australian Curriculum: Technologies.

• Investigate - find out who your visitor is and what they need. Who is this tour for? What makes a good one?

• Generate - come up with ideas, storyboard the scenes and plan the experience.

• Produce - film the 360° footage and build it into scenes a visitor can move through.

• Evaluate - test it on a real audience, take the feedback and improve it.

  
  

  

And just like real designers, students rarely move through the stages in a straight line. Testing sends them back to their storyboard. Feedback sends them back to the camera. That loop is the thinking.

In one eVR Classroom unit now underway with a school in Victoria, students in Years 8–10 will film one area of their own school and turn it into a virtual tour for people who have never set foot inside it. A real brief, a real audience and design decisions that matter.

Any teacher knows the difference between a class making something because it is the task and a class making something because a real person will use it. The second one changes the room.

Along the way, students design user experiences, manage a project, and create a digital solution aligned to the Australian Curriculum v9: Digital Technologies. The headset is the medium. The design process is the learning.

More on the school tour project next week.