Virtual reality: A new frontier in climate change learning

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220413115741390

Located in a building renovated over the past two years, the Dreamscape Learn centre welcomed 1,000 students in this, the first full semester. In place of traditional biology laboratory time, these students attend labs in the state-of-the-art virtual learning centre that cost US$20 million, paid for by Dreamscape Immersive, philanthropy and ASU.

What we’re doing with the alien zoo is replacing conventional biology labs with these highly immersive laboratory modules in which students get to enter into a virtual world and really deal with the way real scientists collect data, look at problems, collaborate, come up with solutions, try the solutions and then come up with other hypotheses.”

Making the abstract concrete

As is the case in many video games, the avatars can travel back in time, in this case to Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when widespread burning of coal began increasing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We have an amazing tool, Schlosser told the conference, to put students next to where things happened, next to where they might look into the future. Doing this makes the abstract become concrete.