VR CLassroom
The VR classroom, which has found its way into teacher training at RWTH Aachen University in a joint project with the educational sciences within the RWTH internal funding line "Exploratory Teaching Space" (ETS), has found a permanent place in our LTI-Lab. The initial funding made it possible to gather experiences with the virtual classroom environment developed at the University of Potsdam, to expand the classroom and to develop didactic concepts for embedding it in the teacher training program.
We aim to continue the resulting cooperation with the researchers from Potsdam beyond the funding period and thus continue to contribute to the improvement of the virtual classroom.
The possible applications for this environment in teaching are manifold. The central idea is to confront students with the difficulties of everyday school life (for example, classroom disturbances) in a protected environment and thus, through joint reflection, to build up a good repertoire of actions to deal with such disturbances. Furthermore, topics such as and classroom management and leadership can be introduced in a playful way.
Due to the current precautions of the Corona pandemic, the evaluation with students is still pending, but we have improved the VR environment in a great cooperation with the developers and adapted it to even better reflect the everyday school life.
We set ourselves goals for the future. For example, we would like to integrate the virtual classroom into the research infrastructure of our lab, expand the implemented scenarios and integrate additional evaluation options such as the detection and tracking of gaze movements.
Further information about the VR classroom can be found on the websites of the developers in Potsdam:
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/multimedia/projekte/anwendungen/vr-klassenzimmer
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/multimedia/projekte/anwendungen/geteilte-werte
If you are interested in writing your thesis in this project, please contact Birte. Feel free to suggest your own ideas.