Exploring Virtual Reality Solution to Challenges Facing the Teaching and Learning of Science in Ga-East District

After engagement with Science teachers in Ga-East District, we were presented with robust information relating to their teaching methods, challenges and their perception of Virtual Reality. The challenge now lay upon us to translate information gathered in the data-gathering exercise into useful insights. These insights will then be used to shape solutions that will be presented to teachers in the Ga-East District.

Insights

From our interaction, we distilled the following insights:

1. Access to media-based curriculum content will be helpful in enabling teachers to prepare for class.
2. Teaching tools, aids, methods that reduce reliance on verbal lectures for lesson delivery will be beneficial to teachers.
3. Teaching methods that allow students the opportunity to have frequent hands-on science activities will be of value to teachers.
4. Learning methods that allow students to have a one-on-one feel of hands-on science activities will be of value to teachers.
5. Teaching and learning methods that facilitate students to completely surrender their attention to their learning task will be of value to teachers.
6. Teaching methods that enable teachers to expand the scope of student assessment delivered, without significantly increasing grading will be of value to teachers.
7. Teachers are most receptive to use technology teaching aid in the classroom when they are the facilitators.

Proposed Solutions

Based on the insights we identified, we settled on a couple of learning technology features which we felt strongly can deliver the desired value to teachers.

• Interactive Demonstrations in virtual reality to simulate practical science activities that otherwise would be skipped or carried out in large class groups.
• Adaptive Exercises to improve teachers' ability to carry out a detailed assessment without the extra burden of increased marking.
• Curriculum-aligned animated Video Lectures to present learning materials using pedagogical strategies and visualizations that facilitate better learners' and teachers' understanding.
• Game-Based Learning Techniques to keep students focused on learning tasks while also employing fun strategies to motivate students pick-up curriculum content that may have missed.
• Teacher’s Panel to enable teachers to keep up with individual student progress on course content while also allowing them to intelligently intervene where necessary

Moving Forward

Our next step will be to further engage with teachers to validate the relevance of our proposed solution to them. Using iterative feedback from teachers, we will proceed to design a virtual reality experience that integrates and applies these features — Interactive Demonstrations, Adaptive Exercises, Video Lectures, Game-Based Learning Techniques — into a single Science topic. Earlier consultation with Practical Education Network and Science teachers in our district revealed Basic Electronics to be a topic that could greatly benefit from improved learning methods given that students and teachers alike do struggle to teach and learn it respectively.