The Global VR project

The goal of this project is to ap­proach the themes of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment and in­no­va­tive learn­ing by us­ing var­i­ous learn­ing en­vi­ron­ments, such as vir­tual re­al­ity.

The project is funded by the Finnish Na­tional Agency for Ed­u­ca­tion, and we col­lab­o­rate with the Joen­suu Yheisk­oulun lukio high school, the NGO plat­form Ser­vice Cen­tre for De­vel­op­ment Co­op­er­a­tion (KEPA) and Lyfta. Lyfta has ex­per­tise in ed­u­ca­tion, vir­tual re­al­ity en­vi­ron­ments and sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment themes.

We planned a one-week project to be im­ple­mented with a group of 140 first-year stu­dents and 6 teach­ers. First, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Lyfta in­tro­duced us to their work, for ex­am­ple Awra Amba and Din­ner 360 en­vi­ron­ments. Stu­dents then had the op­por­tu­nity to ex­pe­ri­ence the VR learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment, some for the first time.

A few weeks later we started the ac­tual project, which lasted four days. On the first day the stu­dents fa­mil­iar­ized them­selves with the prin­ci­ples of sto­ry­telling and learned about the Agenda 2030 Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals (SDGs).

The stu­dents then ar­ranged them­selves into teams based on their SDG of in­ter­est. They cre­ated sto­ries con­sis­tent with their sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment goal, de­signed their own VR world around it and pre­pared sales speeches to pitch their ideas.

The sec­ond day be­gun with the pitch­ing. Many great ideas were pre­sented and the best six were voted into ac­tual pro­duc­tion. From this point there were six teams of some 20 stu­dents where each in­di­vid­ual could choose whether they wanted to work on the con­tent or in tech­ni­cal pro­duc­tion.

The third day was pro­duc­tion day. The ideas were fi­nal­ized, filmed and ex­ported into the vir­tual world. Fi­nally, the fourth day saw the teams present their VR pro­duc­tions.

The best part of the week was ev­ery­one con­tribut­ing to the VR pro­duc­tions. The stu­dents were in­no­va­tive and very brave to put their ideas into prac­tice. From the teach­ers’ per­spec­tive it was re­ward­ing to see how the goals of dif­fer­ent sub­jects were met. In ad­di­tion, we re­ceived an in­spir­ing in­tro­duc­tion into VR sto­ry­telling.

The work con­tin­ues. The GLOVR-project is build­ing a tool­kit de­signed to in­tro­duce teach­ers into the world of VR and to cre­ate their own VR projects. The themes of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment on the other hand con­tinue to be in­te­grated into classes, theme days and more.