Last week, I popped down to Canberra Primary School to take a look at how Dell works with the school and Playware Studios Asia to design an educational platform for immersive learning in the digital edge.
The interior of the 4Di Lab at Canberra Primary School.
During the visit, we checked out the 4Di Lab which is powered by Dell solutions and Playware Studios Asia’s 3DHive technology.
Impressions:
This is an interesting collaboration between the public sector, a hardware supplier and a software solutions provider.
Years of educational experience is embodied in advanced instructional design solutions and powered by cutting-edge hardware.
The result is an immersive educational tool that is able to captivate the young children of today, whilst imparting educational content.
Apart from learning content, the group interactions also served to inculcate teamwork and teambuilding – an element much ignored in many digitalised learning tools today that encourage individual exploration.
The next step is to see how this prototype lab can be shared with other schools.
The lab is set up within a container and aims to deliver an immersive learning experience for primary school students.
Behind the screens of the 4Di Lab.
The game-based learning solution provides an experiential platform for students to collaboratively build their knowledge in an engaging manner.
The lab features projections of virtual worlds on 14 screens — these are 42 square metre interactive touch screens that can interact with up to 45 concurrent users at a time.
During a typical lesson, which lasts for 1-2 periods, the class immerses itself in a “game” scenario which features educational content from different themes such as history, nature and science.
Students can collectively embark on quests in ancient China or trek through Singapore’s rainforests to learn more about its geography.
Through 3DHive technology, the 4Di Lab is polyvalent, delivering a unique experience that is designed to accommodate the users’ particular needs or tastes and allowing for multiple independent messages and conclusions to be derived through interactions within the scenario.
Being multimodal, it also lets users interface with the scenario in more ways than one — directly via the interactive touch screen as well as through tablets.
Wireless connections on personal learning devices are allowed from within the lab as well as remote virtual connections over the Internet and local area network (LAN).
To make the experience even more exciting, the 4Di Lab interprets the overall crowd behaviour of the users, taking such information to enhance the simulation.
Students can input their instant reactions in different scenarios to change a game’s trajectory.
Beyond input, it also reads user’s senses and transmits information through visual, audio and environmental cues.
Educators can also easily create and/or shape game content to suit the syllabus.
Sam Wong, Principal of Canberra Primary School revealed that the school was developing more virtual environments.
While entertaining, he stressed that education was still the goal of the system.
While the 4Di programme harnesses technology to make learning fun, the intent is about finding delight in knowledge and about students creating and owning content.