by Gibrill Martin Sheku Conteh (Sierra Leone) and Terence Finnegan (UK)
Virtually immersive environments have been around for a while but hadn’t quite reached peak popularity until this year. The use case started with gaming but has quickly progressed to professional events. The untapped use case with the MOST potential is education across k-20. Do you remember the magic school bus? Ms Frizzle took her kids on all kinds of adventures. It wasn’t just about fun, these kids deepened their curiosity for the world around them, and brought their own motivation for learning in a huge variety of settings. If only we all had access to a magic bus that could transport our students anywhere. Well, we actually do.
Last month, k20 Educators launched a think tank for virtual world building in partnership with gather.town. Gather.town is an easy to use alternate reality platform accessible via a computer. No VR goggles needed. Anyone can dive in and create virtual environments. k20 Educators is a social network that supports innovation for education and the purpose of this project is to build virtual environments for education that are open source and free to use.
As fellows of this think tank, we’ve been learning both how to create in Gather.town but more importantly, how to produce environments that are appropriate for education from the perspective of engagement, pedagogy, and ease of use. We’re excited to share our learnings as we continue on this journey. We are educators, Gibril from Sierra Leone & Terence from Scotland.
Here are 9 things to consider when you’re building virtual worlds for education!
- Imagine the possibilities, Ms. Frizzle style
When you are planning a virtual lesson, unpack the topic to determine what your virtual space looks like. The huge benefit of virtual teaching is when you can extend reality and create your space as an extension of the learning and take your students on field trips across time & space. So if you’re teaching about volcanoes for example, think about all the parts of the topic — build a space that teleports students INTOthe volcano and perhaps through the phases of eruption.
2. Equip your world for access in an inaccessible reality
Certain concepts taught in our traditional classrooms require students to engage with tools and environments related to the learning. However, this is often impossible for millions of students across the world, especially in developing countries. It is very common in Sierra Leone, for example, for students studying science to get to university level without ever using any laboratory equipment. “Practicals”, or performative tests, are a component of their external examination that lead them to college or university. Now we can’t exactly equip students with tangible tools on a 2D platform, but in Gather.town classroom spaces, educators can build classrooms that bring their subject matter to life. Learners can interact virtually with science equipment, visit museums, their local parliaments and historical sites in their countries. So our second tip is to think about the things your students may not have access to, and build them into your virtual space.
3. Optimize available resources
An appealing classroom for your students is one that speaks to them visually, and that links them more closely with the topic. A classroom that includes images and interactive objects that relate to the concept and subject matter being taught aids the learning process of the students. Designing a space from scratch can be daunting for educators that have more than enough demands on their time as it is, but the design tools from Gather have allowed us to quickly create spaces that look good and where students feel excited about the topic the very moment they step into the space. We also recommend using tile sets available on itch.io that are tagged for use in Gather. Over time we’ll be producing maps and objects that other educators can use to build their own virtual worlds, and we’re always keen to see what spaces the education community can build.
4. Enhance group work
Small groupings in a classroom setting are where educators and students have time to really work together and exchange feedback. In a flat virtual space like video conferencing, the tone of the space is set by just the faces of the participants. But in a virtual world, there are two major benefits:
a) Creating a breakout group is as simple as saying “split into groups of 3 and find a space on your own”, or “everyone who needs help with this exercise, join me by the lake, and everyone else form a group next to the orchard”! Not only is it easier for students to move freely but you also give students more agency by encouraging them to walk over to their selected space.
b) The spaces you create can be…anything! So perhaps one of your breakout groups is by the lake but another is on the moon and the third is in the ocean! Setting up your virtual world with interesting and useful areas is a game-changer for running classes that are more interesting, more engaging and give students back some control over their own learning journeys.
5. Utilize the spotlight feature!
There’s this really neat feature in Gather.town that lets you spotlight an individual. The individual on spotlight gets streamed to everyone in the space, exactly the way a microphone in real life might. There are some cool use cases for this feature:
a) when you need to speak to everyone at once to clarify something, or when your class is so engaged they’ve lost track of time: Muting everybody in a space where multiple conversations are happening at once feels intrusive, but the spotlight lets you make announcements so that folks can pause themselves, listen, and continue their conversations as they see fit.
b) you can also spotlight students in your space when you want everyone to hear them.This can change the role of the facilitator from someone with their finger on the control buttons, to a collaborator who can rely on controls if they need them
6. Collaborate with Students on the building of the world itself
A classroom full of student work and lessons designed in partnership with students is the hallmark of an inclusive classroom IRL. This is also true virtually. Virtual worlds are the perfect opportunity to get students to design their own spaces — a common room with personalized meeting spaces, a classroom overflowing with student work, links to student passions, etc. Consider co-designing lessons with students, allowing them to bring their own ideas into the virtual world, and build it together. An easy way to start is to get their input for a setting — perhaps they’ll decide a debate on space mining could take place in a space colony. Or they could decide that a class on Shakespeare could happen on the set of a movie adaptation of his writing. We recommend giving students the ability to build and encouraging them to add personalized objects to their spaces to make the classroom their own. And maybe even creating their own dorms!
7. Be smart about how you’re tracking student progress
This is probably the least obvious part of building a virtual world and maybe the most important! A virtual world (unlike a video meeting) allows you to be super thoughtful about how students are documenting their progress. Here are a few ideas:
a) Create breakout rooms or private areas for different purposes that track the learning journey. So if a lesson requires multiple steps, create several different private areas that align with those steps. When you see a student moving from one area to the next, you have a clear visual on where students are in their learning. You can also create an area for questions.
b) The interactive objects in the space can be used for both the teacher and students to share reflections, materials, and thoughts about the topic. For example, responses recorded by students on a google form can always be accessed and made reference to when the need arises. So, real time data can always be kept about your students’ learning.
c) Use avatar emotes as another way for students to show that they understand a concept. You can designate each emote to represent a message or reaction that indicates understanding.
d) And finally, posting answers in the chat gives the teacher a chance to look back quickly and make the necessary corrections, if needed. What a better place to learn!
8. Create learning challenges
Gather is often compared to a video game — the look and feel of moving an avatar around a colourful space brings us back to games we played as children. We love the ability to explore a space freely, and building virtual classrooms that give our students choices about how to look, where to stand, and what areas to explore only enhances our opportunities for inspiring and motivating them to learn for themselves. Video games contain decades of thinking about how to engage users, and educators have often referred to this with the learning theory of “proximal development” — the ability to set challenges for your students that are motivating, but not too difficult that they become frustrating. We think you can embrace this when building Gather spaces by constructing challenges for your students that are appropriate for their level and exciting to complete, such as escape room style spaces that test anything from plant anatomy to quadratic equations.
9. Let the space persist
Creating a virtual space that our students have a stake in could mean that they spend time there for many different reasons, just like a physical classroom is a multi-functional space. Students can pop in to complete assignments in pairs or groups, and go back to make references to materials shared at the beginning of the lesson. Students can also meet without the teacher to share ideas and/or reflections from previously taught lessons. Keep this in mind as you create the space.
Get in touch if you’re using virtual world building for Education, we’d love to know what you’re up to.
