Some Cobb County School District teachers took part in a special training session at Wheeler High School on Monday on a staff development day to learn about a virtual reality tool for mathematics and science.
The Prism VR headsets were given to more than 300 teachers to illustrate their potential for solving real-world problems in the STEM fields (here are a few examples).
Prisms VR was founded in 2020, by Anurupa Ganguly, an MIT engineer turned educator, who recently briefed the Cobb Board of Education on the concept. She received a National Science Foundation grant to put together a concept geared toward middle- and high school algebra students in particular.
Ganguly found that traditional STEM instruction “over-indexed on abstract representations while neglecting the other ways through which we express our thinking beyond text and symbolic notation.”
Her goal, she pointed out, was to create a learning system in which “every individual, regardless of their past experiences, would have the tools and resources to change their circumstances, fall in love with great problems, and create lives of mind to solve them.”
The Cobb school district in April expanded the use of Prisms VR to 20 schools, including Daniell, Hightower Trail and Simpson middle schools and Pope and Sprayberry high schools.
Among the Cobb teachers taking the training is Ashley Kaplan of Hightower Trail Middle School.
“The kids are going to love this. The fact they do the VR now, at home all the time with their friends and incorporating this in the classroom, this is very, very cool to bring their interest into the classroom,” Kaplan said in a release issued by the Cobb school district.
“With mobile VR/AR, the math and science classroom is no longer a sterile, word problem on a screen, piece of paper, or a video with penguins and sharks,” Ganguly said.
“Our message to students: Your job in school is to fall in love with great problems and discover frameworks of thought to solve them. Not to memorize other’s creations, only.”
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