Hands On: A Google Cardboard Expedition to Mars
Hands On: A Google Cardboard Expedition to Mars
During the Google I/O 2015 keynote, the search giant announced that it would bring virtual reality into the classroom. Called Expeditions, the system uses Google’s low-cost Cardboard headsets. Not long after the keynote speech, I placed a Cardboard viewer to my face and was transported to Mars.
Cardboard in the Classroom and on the Red Planet
My guide on Mars was a NASA Mars rover driver turned Googler who gave what he called a “criminally short history of the Spirit rover on Mars.” In the session, my classmates and I explored Mars using Spirit’s panoramic images. This wasn’t merely looking at a big picture, though. The images had real depth. Rocks and cliffs jutted out toward me, and shadows seemed to fall like real shadows across the surface of Mars.
As we moved from scene to scene, our guide would draw our attention to particular features. These were marked in my vision with an arrow that pointed toward a circle. When I shifted my vision to the circle, it vanished so as not to obstruct the view. Sometimes, our guide paused the experience by pushing a message to our viewers, cueing us to put our headsets down and look at the teacher.
Our guide led the tour from a tablet, where he could see the same scene we saw, and even little anonymous smiley faces that showed where the 22 members of our Expedition were looking. A side bar could expand to reveal special notes about what we were seeing, though considering his pedigree it seemed safe to assume that he was working off the cuff.
Built With Teachers for Students
The result was immersive like a VR simulation, but also engaging. That’s the point, said Jennifer Holland, program manager for Google Apps for Education and Expeditions. Holland said that the experience I had at I/O was the result of working with 1,000 students in different grades, in over 100 classes, with teachers across all disciplines and over three countries.
Holland and her team began working on Expeditions by asking teachers where they wanted to take their kids. “[Teachers] picked a topic and we worked together to build that Expedition so that they could run that Expedition in class along with other activities,” she said.
Those other activities are actually as important as the Expeditions themselves, since Expeditions are intended to enhance and not replace classwork. By adding different activities to an Expedition, teachers could use the VR experience for a variety of lessons. Holland told me how the Great Wall of China Expedition was initially developed by a sixth grade teacher, and was used in higher and lower grades to teach math, Chinese language, and history.
In addition to Mars and the Great Wall, there are also Expeditions to the Palace of Versailles and Romeo and Juliet’s Verona. Holland also told me about a biology teacher who built an Expedition about coral reefs using Google’s Street View imagery, and an art lesson about graffiti that featured the now destroyed 5 Pointz in Queens, New York.
The Trials of Classroom Technology
It’s easy to dismiss new technology for classrooms, but Holland says that Cardboard is different. For one, it’s not a passive experience, like watching a video. “I can say that none of our teachers did that,” said Holland. Instead, she said students were very engaged with Expedition-based lessons, even pointing out interesting features to students and the teacher. “They were teaching each other, which is really powerful.”
Expeditions is also easy to set up, and is intended to work out of the box without any account to configure or additional equipment. “It doesn’t require Internet connectivity, and runs local, which is a really big deal for schools where bandwidth is a problem,” said Holland.
Another point in Expedition’s favor is that it uses tablets and smartphones, two technologies with which many teachers and students are already familiar. Plus, the Cardboard viewers are cheap to replace and can even be put together by students or teachers.
Though it has already seen use in classrooms, Expeditions isn’t quite ready for primetime. There is not, for example, a tool to let teachers build their own Expeditions, though Holland said that Google was working with partners like New York’s Museum of Natural History to create content for the program.
Currently, Google has no price for the Expedition kit and no time frame for when it will be available to educators. But when it is, students are certainly in for a treat.
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