Benefits Of Mixed Reality In Education
What if students could learn history by visiting the Berlin Wall or the most important sites of the Vietnam War, with their teachers, without having to leave the classroom? With Mixed Reality in education this is possible.
Currently, Mixed Reality appears to us as a new technology, something that is gradually being implemented and that will be tangible, probably, during the next decade. The fact is that it is already being put into practice in an experimental way in more and more educational centers.
Mixed Reality provides an immersive and more effective learning experience for students of all ages. How do you get it? Let’s see it next.
Types of Mixed Reality in the classroom
There are two fundamental ways to use Mixed Reality in the classroom. The first is the most traditional, it is like an approach to the true Mixed Reality. This is a computer desktop setup. Students explore a virtual environment using a computer, keyboard, mouse, or some other device.
The second form is what today is fully identified as real MRI : it is the total immersion experience that requires students to use an HMD ( head mounted display , that is, a virtual reality glasses) and a motion controller.
With these devices, students can interact with an environment produced by a mixture of real and virtual worlds, a world in which physical and digital objects coexist.
Thanks to this real Mixed Reality, they can touch and manipulate concrete objects, which generates a greater understanding of them. They could also interact with complex formulas or data sets.
This second type of Mixed Reality provides a more engaging, fun and effective learning experience than the first and, of course, all other traditional educational methods. And this is true for whatever content we talk about.
Benefits of Mixed Reality in education
Mixed Reality offers educators great and innovative possibilities to explore with students thanks to its features:
Commitment
The direct experience that Mixed Reality provides generates an effective way to captivate students who want to work on it. It can encourage engagement during content development. It is a commitment that arises naturally from the interest that MRI provides .
Universality
Regardless of possible social, economic or geographical differences, Mixed Reality in teaching is capable of uniting people without borders. It is also capable of fostering human interaction, as it does away with all imaginable limits of time and space.
Polyvalence
As we have said before, Mixed Reality can be used to teach any subject. It is easier to see and hear something than to have to listen to an explanation about it, especially if we are talking about certain abstract concepts.
Distant worlds
By using MRI devices , students and teachers can do things unthinkable in everyday reality: go back in time and interact with objects that would otherwise be unthinkable.
Among other things, we can see and touch animals or humans that no longer exist, such as dinosaurs. Students acquire a new and more realistic image for them, that is, they are no longer just a drawing in a book.
Goodbye to geographical limits with Mixed Reality in education
Planning the perfect school trip is not always easy. With MRI this will no longer be a problem, as the class will no longer have limits. We can walk through ancient Greece or visit the pyramids of Egypt whenever we want.
With the applications that exist today, the priority is above all visual and sensory immersions. Anything that can be touched, looked at, and examined virtually is retained in the minds of students more effectively than if it were known otherwise.
Finally, the next step would be to make this technology accessible to more and more educational institutions. We will probably need some time, maybe years, but the effectiveness is already being demonstrated.
