By Maegan Murray

RICHLAND, Wash. 鈥� Jonah Firestone, an education professor at Washington State University Tri-Cities, knows that technology is the future of education, which is why he is researching the use of virtual and augmented reality as tools for not only the general classroom, but specifically with special education in the kindergarten through 12th-grade setting.

鈥淲ith regular video games, you鈥檙e looking at a flat screen,鈥� he said. 鈥淏ut with virtual reality, you wear a head set and you can look all around. It鈥檚 a 360-degree view up and down and you can see this complete world around you. As kids get more used to using this type of technology and as the price goes down, schools are going to start adopting these because you can now send an entire classroom on a field trip to The Louvre without leaving the classroom.鈥�

Firestone said for subjects like science and history, teachers rely on textbook and stationary images to give students a picture of what they鈥檙e talking about as it is expensive to take students to laboratories and settings that are referenced in those lessons. With virtual and augmented reality, however, teachers can bring those settings and projects to the students in the virtual sphere.

鈥淲e can use this technology to put children and adults into complete virtual worlds where they can be a cell in the human body, or students can do experiments in physics and chemistry that they couldn鈥檛 normally safely do in the classroom setting,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou can then repeat those over and over again.鈥�

Overcoming learning disabilities

Firestone said virtual and augmented reality have different purposes, but both can be applied as additional tools in the classroom, which could help students who struggle with traditional learning methods.

鈥淲e used to talk about this thing called learning theories where certain people were characterized as different types of learners, but that鈥檚 not really true,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e all learn in a variety of different ways. But with the more modes in which we learn, whether it be oral, visual or tactile, the more we鈥檙e readily going to learn.鈥�

Some students may have problems processing information that is given to them orally, or students may have visual disabilities where they have difficulty processing static information like documents with lots of text, he said. Students also may have issues holding their attention for an extended period of time.

鈥淪o what virtual and augmented reality do is reinforce learning in ways that helps from a variety of different vectors,鈥� he said. 鈥淎nd realistically, strategies used in special education are good practices for any education setting. We can translate what we learn about these tools into the general classroom setting, as well.鈥�

With virtual reality, students wear a head set where it provides them with a complete 360-degree view of a setting or project that the students can interact with. With augmented reality, students use a device like a tablet or a headset where the device projects an image into the real-world setting. Firestone said a good example of augmented reality is Pokemon Go, where the image of a Pokemon is projected through a screen into the real world.

鈥淲e鈥檝e all taken classes where we鈥檝e aced the class, but we have no idea what we鈥檝e learned,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat we want to accomplish with virtual and augmented reality is a more organic method of learning. This organic method of learning is accomplished through learning by doing.鈥�

Research results so far

Firestone worked with Don McMahon on the 黑料社 Pullman campus to run a study with special education students at the college level who studied bones and skeletons using augmented reality with the help of iPad Minis. They compared what the students learned and absorbed with augmented reality to what they learned and observed from textbooks and the team got great results.

Firestone is now taking that research a step further by applying the same tools to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms.

鈥淐ollege kids are great, but I am very much interested in how these technologies can be applied to the k-12 setting,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat we鈥檙e currently doing is taking this same process and we鈥檙e modifying it for fifth-graders. Then, we鈥檙e going to modify it for middle school and high school.鈥�

Firestone said he is using augmented reality to supplement different school lessons, including science where students observe and learn about the human body.

鈥淚magine looking at a picture of a femur, but with augmented reality, not only do you see a picture of a femur, but it has a voice that defines it for you and then shows you where it is on the human body,鈥� he said.

Firestone is also looking into using virtual reality to immerse the kindergarten through 12th-grade students in an underwater experience called 鈥淭he Blue.鈥�

鈥淚t鈥檚 an underwater application where you see whales and you鈥檙e in a reef,鈥� he said. 鈥淚鈥檓 then comparing that to the same information that the students glean from a text.鈥�

Firestone said he鈥檚 had great results with the technology so far and that blending the virtual experiences with what students are presented with in a textbook is a winning combination.

鈥淭here is no one magic solution for learning, but the more things we can put together, the more kids are going to end up learning,鈥� he said.