Future Trends

     I first explored a few of the gaming applications that were in this week’s lesson.  I really liked Arcademics.  Arcademics is a combination of Arcade games combined with Academics.   The entire notion that education can be fun is the entire reason I chose this major in college.  I had my 8 year old daughter check this out to see what she thinks of some of the games that are offered on this site. This site has a wide variety of learning games for early elementary students including matching, mathematics, and language arts.   It took me a while to be able to actually type this blog post because my daughter was hogging the computer playing the Grand Prix multiplication game so long.  This game was even fun for me to play.  Once you begin playing you have to answer multiplication problems quickly.  Every time you answer a question your Grand Prix car gets a little boost of speed.  The faster you answer the faster your car goes.   The entire time you are competing against other cars.  My daughter forgot she was learning.  Instead she was just having fun.  I loved it.  I didn’t want to stop her.  This is something so simple and easy for teachers to use in the classroom, yet her teachers at school do not promote these kinds of activities.  While it is great to watch her enjoy learning through games, I often get frustrated taking these classes because I see how much better education could be for my own kids if their teachers would implement even half of the ideas we research. 

     For Virtual Reality, I tried to check out Teen Second Life.  Years ago, I had tried playing the normal Second Life in real life but quickly found that this would take a lot of time that I didn’t have to really get into this game so I dropped out before I got addicted.  Second Life is a virtual word where you can create a world and live a life online just as you do in the real world.  You can make money, have a job, build a house, and make friends with other Second Lifers.  You can even get married in Second Life.  It is almost scary.  There may still be my character walking around on the grid somewhere from years ago.  I abandoned Second Life once I realized how entrenched people could actually get into something like that.  When I saw that there was a Teen second life, I wanted to check that out to see how different that would be from the normal second life.  I found that it “was” (past tense) almost the same.  The major difference between Teen Second Life and Second Life was that Teen Second Life was more heavily monitored and adult content was banned.  However, Teen Second Life is now closed.   Apparently the creators of Second Life closed Teen Second Life in 2011. I was not able to find out why.  However, I can probably come up with several reasons that may have factored into the decision to close it.  I was mostly interested in Second Life because of how scary of a platform that could be for people, especially teens.  Teenage years are tough and many teens can be pretty mean.  I can just imagine how mean some teens may could be to one another if they were able to hide their identity and say whatever they wanted from their keyboard.  Although tis was monitored, I still can imagine that kids would find a way to take it too far.  Although something like this could be very valuable in education because most kids would use it properly for good social collaboration and learning; I could see a small percentage ruining it for everyone else.  Teens just are not mature enough in my opinion to behave appropriately, especially when given anonymity. 

     I also checked out Quiver as one of the examples of Augmented Reality.  This is incredibly cool.  Basically, kids can color an image on paper and then launch an app on their tablet that uses a camera to capture the colored image.  Once the image is captured, the image comes to life in the form of Augmented reality.  Students could draw a horse and then watch the horse come to life on the screen right before their very eyes.  Now this is engaging.  I showed this to my daughter as well and now I have to get this for her for Valentine’s Day!  This has a major WOW factor component to it.  When I was a child and I colored in a color book, I always imagined what it would be like to have that image come to life.  Now it actually does, (well it virtually does.)  I am going to show my daughter’s teachers some of these apps and see if maybe they will begin to open their eyes to some of the cool things that are out there.

  Games/Simulations, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality all have the potential to drastically change the way we educate students.  Although many people think games and VR is too violent or that multimedia can be a bad influence we must also remember that it can be a wonderful influnece on our kids.  To ignore technology or to say that it is bad for education is doing our kids a great disservice. "The trick is to find good role playing games, simulation games, or adventure games that do not embrace violence or excessive sexual simulation" (creatingtechingsite.com, 2011)

     When I was a student, we learned about a DNA strand by seeing a diagram in a text book.  Blah!  With Augmented Reality, a student could actually manipulate a DNA strand that could be hovering in front of them.  After manipulating the strand, the student could see what the effects were by changing the DNA slightly or drastically.  With this type of hands on technology.  Students will have the ability to research and learn about things they may have never had access to before.  "Wherever it is too dangerous, expensive or impractical to do something in reality, virtual reality is the answer. From trainee fighter pilots to medical applications trainee surgeons, virtual reality allows us to take virtual risks in order to gain real world experience." (Virtual Reality Blog, 2015) This has real educational value.  I especially think of students who are considering going to medical school someday.  It may b e worth putting them through a virtual reality lesson that has them virtually place their hands on a beating heart just so they could determine if that indeed was something they have passion for.

     Teachers will have the ability to allow the 3D models to teach for them.  Teachers can act more as facilitators.  No longer will it be required for the teacher to be the know it all, end all of all knowledge in the classroom.  With gaming, VR, and AR, available teachers will be able to let the technology do most of the teaching while the kids soak in the knowledge.  This is truly an awesome way to educate people.