Hi there, we are VRMonkey from Brazil and we were selected by Intel for the Ultimate Coder Challenge VR: VI! Yayyy
For several years we have been facing harsh economic crises and social challenges, and looking into solutions it is hard to find any that could address these issues in a more permanent way and improve overall life quality in developing countries (or anywhere in the world). With technology being more and more a part of our daily life (first with personal computers and recently with smartphones) we have been able to witness some great revolutions in transportation, communication and other fields, and now Virtual Reality gives us opportunities to go even further.
Tech has come to improve our lives in ways which we have never thought about and we do believe that the only way to solve our social and economic problems in the long term is through education. Using Virtual Reality as a disruptive mean to approach the daily life of students, we aim to provide a more equal and better environment for learning. This is not only because more people will have access to scientific laboratories due to cost reduction, but also for a lot of other reasons such as:
- It makes learning more interesting and fun in order to improve motivation and attention;
- It makes possible to explore situations that are impossible in the real world, for example: exploring a planet like Mars, traveling within the human body, making explorations underwater, or inside caves, visiting places too small to be seen (molecules) or that are very expensive or very distant, or traveling in time and seeing historical places.
- It eliminates environmental hazards and risks to the teacher or to the student.
- It accelerates the learning process
- It integrates skills and knowledge
- It increases retention through reinforcement
- It increases retention through the sense of realism
- It improves the transfer of learning to the real world
- It gives access to learning content anywhere at any time
To take a better advantage of the possibilities offered by VR in the field of education, we invited 3 professors supported by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) as consultants:
- Romero Tori, from University of São Paulo
- Marly Campos, from Educ 4x100
- Cris Assumpção, from Educ 4x100
We are also looking for a partner school to test and get the students’ and teachers’ feedback.
This week we’ve chosen the forensic themes and the competencies that we want the students to develop through our CSI experience.
With this in mind, we defined the crime story.
“A teenager arrives home and realizes that her room is messed up. The window glass was broken, and her jewels are gone.”
Curious? Take a peek on what we have done since the start of this challenge and, please, hit us with as many feedbacks as you can, so we can create something amazing!
Can you find the culprit?