Watch the latest episode 19 of The Drax Files featuring Julia Tiraxibar who teaches Chemistry at Texas A&M University. This episode runs for 4 minutes and 59 seconds. This episode is very informative and educational from start to finish I think. There are great views from inside Second Life showing different educational areas.
It’s very interesting to hear about students using a replicated lab in Second Life to run experiments and visualising the chemical processes. Students who used Second Life found it better than the real life lab. The results showed that Second Life students data came out better.
Episode 19 Details
The students using the replicated lab in Second Life had better retention of information than the students only using the physical lab!” Wendy Keeney-Kennicutt from Texas A&M University is excited about the preliminary findings of her study about how the unique affordances of virtual reality platforms like Second Life can facilitate and enhance the learning process.
Conducted together with Kurt Winkelman from the Florida Institute of Technology, the study comparing physical lab and virtual lab is funded by an NSF grant and slated to be finished in April 2015.
While the findings [so far] maybe indeed eye-opening for many who have not engaged with virtual reality in an educational context, for pioneering teachers and enthusiastic students alike they can hardly be seen as a surprise: learning in virtual worlds creates a strong sense of being together and collaborating in one shared space irrespective of physical location powerfully transcends – via avatar-based interaction – a multitude of social issues.
Episode 19 – Virtual Chemistry
Watch previous episodes of The Drax Files here and stay tuned for episode 20. Woooot!!!
Daniel Voyager 