Today we are seeing kids in classrooms with personal devices that are responsible for managing course loads, all of their homework, and of course the ever important personal life of social media and general communications. Those devices are also heavily used for gaming primarily as a form of entertainment. What if we were able to get that type of time commitment from kids on a daily basis to do homework or grow skills? Or maybe have fun but also be developing critical thinking habits or team building? The great thing is educators are already using gamification but now it’s available in Virtual Reality.
As a planet we spend over 3 billion hours a week playing video and computer games. That is nearly 25 minutes for each human being on the planet today. I can personally remember a time when it was a big deal to have a PC in your home and the amazing devices we have available today were strictly ideas in Star Wars and in Sci-Fi shows. The world as we know it is changing so fast in regards to technology it seems nearly impossible for us to keep up with all of it especially in the world of gaming and Virtual Reality. The technology that we saw on TV is now available for our kids to learn and have fun while they do it.
Understanding gamification and its effectiveness beyond anecdotal evidence and hype is evidently a pertinent practical issue as well as, increasingly, a scholarly pursuit. Regardless of the increasing amount of both industry chatter and scholarly articles, there still is a dearth of coherent understanding whether gamification works and under which circumstances. To address this gap, we reviewed empirical studies on gamification. We focused on investigations and studies that were carried out by Huotari & Hamari 2012; Zhang 2008 what were the implemented affordances (independent variables), psychological and behavioural outcomes (dependent variables), what was gamified, as well as the methods and results of these studies.
The current empirical research on gamification largely supports the popular view that, indeed, gamification does produce positive effects, but many caveats exist. Most frequently, the studies bring forth three categories of caveats: the context of gamification, qualities of the users using the system and possible novelty effects. We encourage educators to review these findings as it is the future of education.
Earlier this year some amazing educational immersive experiences became available like the Apollo 11 Launch, Titans of Space, and Mars is a real Place. Could you fathom as a young person the ability to sit in your classroom and SEE MARS up close and personal without ever leaving your seat or the planet?! Well you can with VR Vision!
We aim to bring some of these experiences in to schools so children can have a more visual and engaged learning experience. It also shakes up the general day to day school and classroom environment and gives them the ability to be a part of a foreign world they may never see so closely otherwise! We have a list of titles that are designed and developed around team building, critical thinking and problem solving. We have content for artists to be uber creative with or just draw smiley faces with if they wish.
The beautiful thing about Virtual Reality technology and Education is people can learn and see things in person they may not ever be able to see and have a ton of fun while doing it! There is Virtual Reality experiences and content that has been developed to train the world’s doctors. Lets bring it to our kids as well.
