Lockdown has a lot of students studying from home, and now teachers are using Half-Life Alyx to teach their students as a new initiative.
Most of us are stuck at home with lockdown these days and this includes those students who have been actively engaging in classes.
Poland is just one of the countries that has made online education mandatory. Poland went into lockdown in an attempt to curb the effects of the virus on the 11th of March, Online learning was made mandatory on the 25th of March.
As such, teachers in Poznań Poland have come up with a clever way to teach their English classes from the safety of their own homes.
These teachers have been using the popular game Half-Life: Alyx in VR as a teaching tool for their English classes. Five days after the mandatory ruling, the first of six two-hour seminars taught via Half-Life: Alyx was made available to the students of ZSkola 33 on Social Media.
The video below shows one such lesson as the teacher takes you through her flat and points out various everyday objects and their uses, even taking to writing on the window with a marker to illustrate the various names of the objects she is showing.
Teacher Katarzyna Sut told Upload VR: “We decided to use VR in lessons because it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new and to engage our students in online classes.
The pandemic had just started back then, the schools were closed, and we wanted to interest our students in the classes somehow.
We also hoped that it would help them with the uncomfortable situation everyone found themselves in – those first few weeks were not easy for kids, being on lockdown in their homes and not able to roam freely.”
This innovative new project was the result of a partnership between the ZSkola 33 school and a local media company called OFFshot, who had helped with the integration of educational functionality into the virtual reality of Half-Life: Alyx.
There are currently six of these online VR lessons, some of them lasting up to two hours long. The lessons had combined live and pre-recorded material, and were uploaded to Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube.
The school was equipped with an HTC VIVE Pro and three cameras, they recorded languages, Mathematics, and science lessons, with the teachers using pens inside of the game to draw diagrams, as well as teaching the children vocabulary in a virtual kitchen.
Katarzyna Sut said: “We believe the students liked them,” she says. “From younger kids to teenagers, we have seen all of the age groups of our school gather together on Facebook to watch them. Going by the emojis they shared and reacted with, as well as the comments, they enjoyed them very much.
We also hope they got something out of them, knowledge-wise, but as to this, time will tell!”
This initiative shows the determination of the human spirit to provide some form of “normalcy” in this chaotic time. We love to see how the human spirit endures even in times of crisis. These teachers have really added a bit of fun to a bad situation.