Dan, Kennedy, Jeff, Sophie, and Lizzy attended the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in Philadelphia from June 23-25.
They presented their virtual reality game, “Mission: Water,” under the umbrella of Microsoft’s presence at the conference.
The ISTE Conference was very successful: close to 100 people demoed the game or chatted with the team about the project. Many educators and technologists expressed their excitement for the game and for the lesson plan, which will be published on PBS LearningMedia this fall. The team is very excited for the positive response and is looking forward to the official launch of all of the resources later this year.
The VR game is available already here for free.
The WGBH team, led by Bill Shribman, has been collaborating with Microsoft for the last year developing this game for a middle school classroom. The game consists of two networked apps: one VR game and one HTML5 game, both connected and communicating to each other.
In the experience, two players need to work together to travel through the solar system and collect samples of water at three destinations. The water samples provide data for the students to analyze and compare, and then the students can discuss which location provides the most abundant and accessible forms of water.
One high school teacher reacted to playing this as follows, talking about the children she teaches:
Digital Things! 