Virtual Reality Programming in Schools

[pugrick_31]

Hi All,

 

Looking to see if anyone has or is thinking similarly with us. We run a coding club for students at our school and are looking at purchasing a virtual reality headset to expand our current range of coding experiences.

 

Has anyone done this yet in their school, one of our computing teachers has to put in a bid to our Head of IT to justify buying one.

 

If we find it to be successful we may also look at implementing it as part of the curriculum.

 

All views, opinions and potential problems welcome.

 

Thanks,

[dhicks]

We run a coding club for students at our school and are looking at purchasing a virtual reality headset to expand our current range of coding experiences.

 

Do you have any more details? If this is a extra-curriculum club, is this a more limited size group (6? Maybe 6 pairs / groups?). What sort of development environment are the pupils going to use - or, more importantly, what sort of environment is their teacher going to be able to support them using? If you want to do full 3D environments you can move around in real-time you're probably looking at something like Unity for a development environment - might take a bit of time to get set up, and you'll need reasonably capable hardware to run it on. Are you thinking of a teathered VR headset, with the computing power provided by a desktop machine, or a stand-alone headset with a phone or similar in the front? The latter is cheaper, and more portable (pupils could take the hardware home, or just use their own phones). I'm not sure what development looks like for those platforms - I'm guessing you can use Unity, and I think Google have a bunch of browser-based APIs for VR-from-the-browser.

 

"VR" here could also mean 360-degree photos / videos, the hardware for which is remarkably affordable - £100 gets you a 360-degree camera these days.

[mavhc]

google cardboard seems like the way to go, £5 device to put your phone in and then https://developers.google.com/cardboard/develop

 

And now it's 5 years later every phone can do it.