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At The Grange Institution (TGI), Singapore, our future-focused curriculum supports our unique Cre8tors-in-Action© educational philosophy aimed at developing Global Citizens by equipping them with the following 8 core competencies:
Construction & Design
Respecting the Environment
Entrepreneurial Spirit
Active Citizenship
Teamwork & Partnerships
Original Ideas
Recognising Issues
Service Leadership
To model effective collaboration with real-world partners, and to showcase original ideas, TGI has an exciting partnership with VERE360 to create immersive educational content for our students. VERE360 was our perfect partner of choice as the company was founded by two amazing young entrepreneurs, who were the kind of persons we hope our TGI students would aspire to become in the future.
VERE360 complements the school’s current ways of teaching with virtual reality experiences, so that our students can see what they learn come to life immediately! From our experience, virtual reality can empower teachers to conduct highly engaging lessons that leads to possibly greater retention of knowledge. In this article, we share a few humble examples as part of our beginning efforts with the IPC and VR.
Example 1: “What’s in your head?”
Complementing the Milepost 1 and 3 - Brainwave Units
This VR experience brought our students inside our heads! Students played with a 3D modelled puzzle where they could take apart parts of the brain to learn about the parts’ functions. Afterwards, the students put the parts of the brain back together, learning about the basic anatomy of the brain. Here is a demo of the 3D modelled content that was used for the lesson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Example 2: “A Day in the Life of a Water Droplet”
Complementing Milepost 2 - On Tap
This Year 3 lesson helped students recap what they have learned previously about the water cycle. Using virtual reality, the students tracked the journey of a water droplet that went through the processes of evaporation, condensation and precipitation. This lesson helped students consolidate their knowledge of the water cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Example 3: “Greek Pottery Story - Icarus”
Complementing Milepost 1 - The Stories People Tell
In this Unit of Learning our Year 1 students explored stories as a clue into our civilisation and our culture. The teacher and the students explored different countries from around the world. This VR experience encourage them to find out about stories through a non-book medium and the use of shadow puppetry showcased another way many civilisations told stories as part of their cultures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Note: The above experience might be limited unless viewed using a VR headset.
As you can see, our VR content is still developing and while it still has an amateurish feel to the final creation, we are nevertheless very proud that it is a true collaboration between our teachers and the VR designers. There are lots of easily available VR contents in the market; however, what we truly value in this TGI and VERE360 partnership, is that we can truly customise the content to suit the IPC learning taking place.
