STEAM Archives - Tech Trends

How Mixed Reality is Transforming Learning

Alice — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:03:45 +0000

Mixed Reality is increasingly being used to teach the creative and collaborative skills needed for the digital age.

As all major tech giants converge in London this week for BETT UK – arguably the biggest event in the EdTech calendar – many companies like Microsoft are keen to showcase how immersive technologies can be powerful aids to learning.

“Technology has the power to unlock limitless learning, and lesson plans that encourage hands-on and visual learning drive deeper engagement from students,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Studies show improved test performance and passion for learning among students who experience 3D content, girls in particular.

Many companies like Microsoft are keen to showcase how immersive technologies can be powerful aids to learning
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One tool which has proved extremely successful in doing so has been Minecraft: Education Edition, which is used in classrooms in more than 115 countries. This spring, a free Chemistry Update will enable teachers to use Minecraft to engage students of all ages in chemistry through hands-on experimentation. Students will be able to leverage the game-based learning with which pupils are already familiar with to build compounds and tackle complex topics like stable isotopes in a highly visual way.

One tool which has proved extremely successful in doing so has been Minecraft: Education Edition, which is used in classrooms in more than 115 countries
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“Our research shows the most effective learning involves multiple regions of the brain. In the era of mixed reality – which includes augmented and virtual reality – we are working with our partners to deliver products and experiences that will help teachers push the boundaries of their curricula,” says Mehdi.

It is no secret that Microsoft believes that Mixed Reality represents the next computing revolution, and Anthony Salcito – Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft – confirms that in addition to a new features and hardware releases aimed at the education market, they are looking to significantly expand their Mixed Reality curriculum offerings through strategic content partnerships.

Microsoft is looking to significantly expand its Mixed Reality curriculum offerings through strategic content partnerships
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Pearson will begin rolling out curriculum that will work on both HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality immersive VR headsets
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Among those is a project with PBS and NASA’s “Bringing the Universe to America’s Classrooms” and Oceans: Our Blue Planet – a collaboration between Microsoft Education and BBC Earth that will launch in the Spring to explore ways to bring the BBC’s content to life in classrooms and museums across the world.

Pearson the world’s largest education company – will also begin rolling out in March curriculum that will work on both HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality immersive VR headsets. These six new applications will deliver seamless experiences across devices and further illustrate the value of getting hands-on with technology immersive educational experiences, teaching everything from anatomy to math.

Students build tools with LEGO bricks from the Simple & Powered Machines set or cardboard to create and visualize an initial transportation plan for the development of an island National Park in Excel
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Together with LEGO Education, Microsoft’s Hacking STEM program (already used by educators in over 75 countries worldwide) will also offer schools a new, free online lesson plan where students use the Pythagorean Theorem to explore and measure topography in 2D/3D space. They will be offering a new free online Hacking STEM lesson plan that has students use the Pythagorean Theorem to explore and measure topography in 2D/3D space. Acting as environmental surveyors and engineers, students build tools with LEGO bricks from the Simple & Powered Machines set or cardboard to create and visualize an initial transportation plan for the development of an island National Park in Excel. They can then bring their National Park to life by adding topographic elements.

LEGO Education and Microsoft’s Hacking STEM program will use the Pythagorean Theorem to explore and measure topography in 2D/3D space
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Until May 31st 2018, qualified academic institutions will be able to purchase discounted Commercial and Developer HoloLens units at 10% off
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Mehdi says that over the last year Microsoft has seen remarkable instances of teachers and institutions using Microsoft HoloLens to bring 3D experiences to life in the classroom. To keep up with growing demand for HoloLens in the classroom they have also announced that they will be making a limited-time academic pricing offer available for HoloLens. Until May 31st 2018, qualified academic institutions will be able to purchase discounted Commercial and Developer HoloLens units at 10% off in select markets where HoloLens currently ships. Additionally, they hope that the release of the Windows Mixed Reality immersive VR headsets at a lower $299 price point will also help to build up the momentum for take-up of MR technology in the classroom.

Creativity is predicted to be one of the top three most desired skills by employers in 2020
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According to Futuresource, the worldwide education market grew 15 percent year-over-year, yet although Microsoft is certainly staking its claim on that market, it also has a significant Philanthropic Commitment to Education, donating over $1.2 billion in software and services to more than 90,000 nonprofit organizations around the world in 2017.

According to Futuresource, the worldwide education market grew 15 percent year-over-year
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With nine out of ten teachers seeing creativity as central to future careers and 93 percent of students view technology as key, the two clearly go hand-in-hand
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Creativity is predicted to be one of the top three most desired skills by employers in 2020. With nine out of ten teachers seeing creativity as central to future careers and 93 percent of students view technology as key, the two clearly go hand-in-hand, and it is increasingly becoming clear that immersive technologies are going to be the glue that binds those two trends together.

#Immersive learning transforming #education – https://t.co/dE0JZhEKLj @alicebonasio @CIOonline @IDGCN

— IDG Contributor Network (@IDGCN) January 23, 2018

This article was originally published on IDG Connect

Tech Trends’ Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to get a foothold in the growing Mixed Reality spectrum and enhance their brand strategy with immersive technologies.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post How Mixed Reality is Transforming Learning appeared first on Tech Trends.

Beyond STEM and into STEAM: How We Need Creativity to Power Technology

Alice — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 12:33:12 +0000

We hear a lot about the digital skills gap and the need to get more kids interested in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics but there’s a missing element in that line of thought, which more people are starting to notice.

We should be encouraging STEAM – in other words adding “Art’ (in its broadest sense) to that list because creativity is an essential ingredient of technological innovation. And like any other skill, it needs to be taught, developed and encouraged from an early age and throughout our lives.

In this Huffington Post article I talk to Creative Director Chris Waind from Canadian start-up Finger Food Studios (the company behind Sphero’s app and collaborative platform) about how designers and other professionals in the technology industry need to develop diverse skil-sets and embrace divergent thinking, and what he looks for when recruiting his own creative tech talent.

Creativity and Technology go together like a horse carriage
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There’s a general perception, often perpetuated by the structure of our education system, that science and the arts are somehow separate – even irreconcilable – entities. Far from being incompatible, however, there’s a growing recognition that creativity and logic actually work to augment one another. Humanity’s greatest achievements have, in fact, resulted from cross-disciplinary thinking and collaboration.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the technology sector, where successful start-ups such Airbnb, Uber and Deliveroo have disrupted entire industries, not through R&D breakthroughs, but by leveraging tech creatively and providing new solutions to existing problems. And the cornerstone of this type of product development is the integration of “Art” – meaning imaginative and intuitive thinking – into the logical, analytical and technical processes that form the core of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics curriculum. Hence the fact that we’re seeing a shift from STEM into STEAM both in education and in the workplace.

We’re seeing a shift from STEM into STEAM both in education and in the workplace.
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There’s a general perception, often perpetuated by the structure of our education system, that science and the arts are somehow separate
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That culture of creative learning and curiosity is something that robotics company Sphero has been extremely successful in fostering. Since starting out as Techstars graduates in 2010 the Colorado-based start-up has sold over a million of its programmable robots in over 80 countries and built a global community around its product.

Sphero owes its popularity not only to the endearing nature of its round robots, but to the amazing flexibility of the platform developed by their Canadian partners, Finger Food Studios. Their SPRK Lightning Lab app is platform agnostic and works with pretty much any device including Android, iOS, ChromeBooks, Amazon Fire, and Nook. It not only offers hundreds of ready-made hands-on activities, but caters for every level of ability simultaneously, without creating artificial or limiting silos. Complete beginners can start out by commanding their robots to perform simple tasks by using their mobile device (something as simple as drawing a path for the Sphero to follow, for example) and gradually engage in more complex activities as they gain confidence, using a block-based drag and drop interface, or eventually transitioning into writing text programming sequences in different coding languages.

Sphero owes its popularity not only to the endearing nature of its round robots, but to the amazing flexibility of the platform
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In spite of Sphero’s relatively high price point, they worked hard to avoid it becoming a “whitebread” product, explains Finger Food’s Creative Director Chris Waind. “We wanted it to work on legacy phones, not only because children were likely to be using hand-me-down models but because we wanted to get into inner city schools, so you could access it with a donated phone, for example.” That presented huge design challenges, not only with coping with smaller screens, but different specs and coding which required a dedicated QA team specifically testing and troubleshooting for those types of devices.

Waind says that building that platform was an incredibly ambitious and progressive project, and one that required his team to exercise their own creative skills through every stage of development. It began – like most projects at the company tend to – with one massive whiteboard session and a whole lot of “blue sky thinking,” setting out all the things they would ideally like to achieve.

“That board looked absolutely insane,” Waind recalls. We would have been happy to achieve a fraction of that, but the amazing thing is that we’ve since done most of what we envisaged on that day.”

Visualization is key to a lot of Finger Food’s projects (the company is currently developing cutting-edge Mixed Reality work for Fortune 500 clients) “Our designers and developers are often working to create things that are helping to visualize the data of the world,” says Waind, whose own fascination with the visual side of things was born from the challenges he faced growing up with dyslexia. At a time when most teachers still expected children to learn everything by rote, reading and writing was such a challenge he resorted to drawing everything, and this turned out to be a gift. “It meant I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do by the time I was eight. I failed in everything at school except Arts, Physics and English, and I firmly believe that this was due to having great teachers in those subjects.”

His story illustrates how important it is for both teachers and parents to support children’s learning in a flexible way in order to enable the development of their creative skillset. “My dad is an engineer, so from a very early age we were instilled with this curiosity about the way that things work, and were encouraged – much to my mum’s dismay – to look at any object and pull it to bits, see how it works, and try and put it together again.” He then goes on to say how his son inherited that same curiosity: “last night for our bedtime story we were basically reading manuals on compression cylinders and combustion engines, to make improvements to this technical LEGO set he was building” he tells me with a distinct note of pride in his voice.

But quite apart from all the fun, this “maker gene” is becoming an increasingly marketable skill in the digital economy, and is something that Waind looks for in recruiting for the fast-growing team at Finger Food: “Do you like to make things? That’s what usually determines whether someone will fit in here or not. We have this amazingly diverse team, but what unites us all is that every designer here is absolutely fascinated by how things work.”

The digital economy will demand that we integrate creativity in every aspect of learning and problem-solving throughout our lives
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Yet those skills are far from universally nourished and encouraged, even in current educational practices. Tests such as the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) which weigh factors such as fluency, originality and elaboration to measure children’s creative capacity have shown a worrying declining trend, prompting some commentators warn of a looming creativity crisis that could have serious impact on entrepreneurship.

CEOs acknowledge that creativity is a crucial success factor for their companies, yet to address the digital and creativity skills gap and equip children for the workplace of the future, we must do away with this artificial separation between “right brain and left brain.” The digital economy will demand that we integrate creativity in every aspect of learning and problem-solving throughout our lives.

From STEM to STEAM: How Science Needs Creativity to Flourish https://t.co/R4FV42C3SQ via @HuffPostBlog @Sphero… https://t.co/MhlbWBdYoW

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) January 8, 2017

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Beyond STEM and into STEAM: How We Need Creativity to Power Technology appeared first on Tech Trends.