Paige Werner

Seeing the World through a Different Reality

Cost limits the ability to take students on trips to place where volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes are prevalent. After traveling to places where these natural disasters have occurred, I have a better understanding of how and why they take place. Using Virtual Reality headsets my students will be able to visit these places without ever leaving my classroom. They can stand beside an erupting volcano and see building crumple during an earthquake. To implement this strategy, I would need to buy a 5 pairs of virtual reality googles for my classroom. Allowing for stations to be used so that students can experience multiple places during each class period. When you buy the Occulus VR googles they provide access to thousands of videos and virtual reality experiences. My research question to guide my research would be “Can ‘’experiencing” natural disasters help to improve understanding of the underlying causes behind them?” Student engagement and increased student understanding will prove that my innovation is successful. To measure the success of my innovation I will continually use formative assessments with an overall summative assessment and student survey at the end to measure student understanding, student engagement, and overall student satisfaction. The student survey will be a large indicator in the role that the innovation played in their overall satisfaction and understanding. I believe that bringing a new engaging way to teach topics like plate tectonics, DNA, and space exploration with VR experiences like the Apollo 11 landing, glimpses of DNA, and many more it will increase student engagement and understanding.