Nowadays we live in an era of a constant progress and it is extremely hard for us, adults, to keep up with a mind-blowing daily stream of information we are a part of. So, if it is us, who are struggling hard, how difficult it must be for kids to comprehend everything that is going on: from a comforting space of their own room, to the scaring depth of the Universe. This is why, a thing like VR comes in handy during the all steps of education, as it is about learning through experience and connecting to the world in a very special way. So, let's take a closer look on how virtual reality is being used in pre-schools, elementary, secondary schools and higher education.
From infancy, it is vital for a child to interact with the world through sounds, colours, gestures and enhance a real-life experience. In primary school kids are building a vocabulary, learning how to express themselves and afterwards – get into the art of storytelling. When your kid is six, you want them to learn about basics of the world functioning and make is as exciting as possible, combining a theory with the safest way to experience a real-world exploration – it all requires an immersive tool, which is VR. Virtual reality enriches the excitement, complement the experience and helps kids reveal their hidden hobbies and interests, like being able to explore Mars so thoroughly might create a life-time obsession with space. What is even more important – it makes an education process interesting from the very beginning and creates a willingness to learn on the earliest stages of life.
When it comes to elementary and secondary schools, VR is also proved to play an enormous role in teaching by providing an environment that allows students to experience a wide range of situations rather than imagining them, including those that are physically impossible to set up in the classroom. During these years of school, individuals are dealing with a huge amount of new and complex information, which is difficult to comprehend based on the theory itself. VR systems help them to absorb a brand-new knowledge using three sources: immersion, interactivity and multi-sensory feedback, meaning that kids can derive an information from more than one sense and enrich an experience by making it more believable and engaging. Moreover, the range of subject matter that can be taught with the help of virtual reality is crazy; from the sciences and geometry to history, space studies to arts, paleoethology to cultural heritage and so on.
A growing generation of scientists, developers and business people happen to integrate with VR on the highest level. Take medicine, for example; students who are learning advanced science are already using the full potential of immersive technologies.Simulations and views of the body and its inside as well as being able to experience the world from the perspective of a patient having a specific disease may have a long-lasting influence on the way, a student will understand a field. Not only complex studies, such as science take an advantage of VR, it has a creative side as well. Immersive, 360-degree photography and videography are becoming more and more valuable as new forms of media. Virtual reality allows students to build multi-perspective material, upload and modify their own content, gives them the tools to tell stories in a new way and look at the world from limitless perspectives.
The potential of VR in education is strongly supported by the interest it has generated from researchers and cutting-edge companies, operating in this field. More and more systems of virtual reality, serving an educational purpose, are being currently developed in order to help children of all ages integrate with the real world more actively. The increasing number of institutions are using virtual reality as a multisensory interactive medium for kids to engage all senses and maximize the outcome, this stands true for those who are just starting to learn about the world surrounding them, as well as those doing advanced researches and digging to the depth.