Voyage

“Exploring The World, Without Leaving The Classroom”

Project Title: Voyage
Team Members: Sharan Shodhan, Julian Korzeniowsky, Rajeev Mukundan, Na-yeon Kim, Sijia He
Faculty Advisors: Heather Kelley, Scott Stevens
Client: Cornell School District

The Idea

When ETC student Sharan Shodhan learned that Allegheny County’s Cornell School District  acquired Google Pixel phones and Daydream VR headsets — without a clear use for them — he saw an opportunity.

Shodhan knew that VR’s immersive ability also had a tendency to isolate people from each other, something that limits its use in a social environment like a classroom. As a result, he started thinking about creating a multiplayer VR experience designed specifically for use in schools — one where students could explore digital environments together while guided by their teachers.

They chose to focus on middle school science, designing an experience that would help students understand ecosystems through interaction and teamwork. The team thought about it as a virtual field trip, in this case to a deciduous forest where students would learn about the biome through a scavenger hunt through the woods.

The Process

They began playtesting with a Cornell School District 7th-grade science class early on in the semester, quickly discovering project pain points. Some of them were typical problems with VR: students got dizzy, and they were confused by how to move around and interact with the space. Others were common classroom problems, with some students solving scavenger hunt clues faster than others and spoiling the experience,while others clicked around at random without reading the clues.

The team adapted quickly, talking extensively with the students and with their teacher to see what would improve the experience. For the problems adapting to VR, the team redesigned the user interface to make interacting with the world more intuitive — optimizing the controls and adding visual cues — like giving avatar’s scarves in team colors — to indicate what students were supposed to do.

They also adapted the rules of the scavenger hunt to fix the pedagogical problems with the experience. To force students to work together, the team shrunk the group size from 6-7 to 3-4. They also instituted a cooldown period in between guesses to prevent students from speeding through the activity by rapidly clicking. And they added analytics tracking into the software — allowing them to see how long students were spending on each clue or looking at a plant or animal.

This gave them empirical data to reference after playtesting sessions and revealed that the changes they made were working. They could see that students’ avatars clustered together as they moved through the experience; this meant that the students preferred to stick together and work through the scavenger hunt as a team rather than go off on their own — even if it meant they saw less of the VR world. They weren’t just learning — they were learning together.

The Impact

• Introduced students in a small school district to cutting-edge technology, encouraging thoughtful, social learning
• Presented at the ACM CHI 2018 Workshop on Novel Interaction Techniques for Collaboration in VR, contributing valuable insights to the growing field of educational VR design.
• Featured at SIGGRAPH 2018, National K-12 Educational Research Summit 2017, the Connected Learning Summit, and at the Association for Educational Communications and Technology

The project demonstrated that carefully-designed educational VR experiences can foster, rather than hinder, classroom collaboration. The team’s project showed them that, through careful design and attention to detail, technology can serve multiple purposes and allow us to see the world in new ways.