Transcript – EducatAR: Supplementing the STEM Classroom Experience

Our project entitled Educator Supplementing the STEM Classroom Experience, intended to explore how augmented reality and virtual reality tools might be used to extend the methods used in the STEM education ecosystem, the idea was motivated by the fact that most teaching tools from the beginning of university still today often rely on two dimensional surfaces, whether that be writing or drawing on chalkboards or whiteboards. While many of the concepts that are addressed in a number of different fields, from engineering to science to mathematics, are higher dimensional and often three dimensional. And so, this project combined faculty from aerospace engineering, atmospheric sciences and materials science and engineering and sought to do three things. Look at how students and professors could create new teaching content, how especially students could interact with this content that was developed by teachers, and then how the experience could be shared between educators and students using cloud resources, especially in the case of distance education, a frame was used, which is a HTML and JavaScript based platform for developing easily shareable and net workable virtual reality experiences. And this methodology was applied to three case studies, one in material science, where the development and growth of precipitates in a material was assessed and animated. And this has already been used in a online summer school. The atmospheric science test case looked at visualizing storms, predicted storms that have been computed, and especially the 3D structure of these storms. And the aerospace engineering example looked at doing structural analysis of aerospace components with particular developments here being the fact that this analysis can actually be performed in the VR environment for future work. We’ve already been asked to apply these tools to other bigger projects and are continuing to look for education funding. Thank you.