World travel with VR: the innovative approach of THINK Global School
Founded in 2010, THINK Global School is the first traveling high school where students live and learn in four countries a year, making memorable connections between their education and the world around them.
Instead of learning only through textbooks and traditional courses, Think Global School students explore the globe for real cultural and social experiences. With a combination of real-world exploration, skills mastery and project-based learning. Students are in charge of
their own learning.
For Russell John Cailey, Principal at THINK Global School, the use of Immersive Learning is one way to make education more experience-based, more interactive but also to capture knowledge from everywhere in the world.
We couldn't have revolutionized our education methods without Uptale
« Uptale was massively important in the success of our project because it gave us a place to build our experiences. I loved being part of this really exciting project. We couldn’t have revolutionized our education methods without Uptale. »
— Russell John Cailey, Managing Director of THINK Global School
Why did you go for Virtual Reality?
We were traveling around the world, seeing all these amazing sites, but had kind of lost faith in the traditional learning system. We all believed education should be different. It shouldn’t be grade based, it shouldn’t be test based.
That’s why 2 years ago, we launched a new challenging program called « Changemaker Curriculum » to transform education into project based and experience based learning.
That’s when VR came in handy, to integrate immersive technologies into students training in order to introduce them to places and monuments, to learn more about a particular event that happened in the country they’re in, etc… more generally, to acquire the necessary skills to move forward.
What VR experiences have been created?
The goal was to connect each VR experience to a particular lesson. To do that, students (which are in charge of their own learning) created traveling experiences with Uptale. Youcan discover through their explanations important places and monuments in specific countries.
So now let’s see more what it looks like with Japan.
Miyajima Island experience (home of the floating temple)
It was a small introduction project to introduce the students to Uptale and to let them get familiar with 360 cameras.
Social sciences and anthropology in Hiroshima
Immerse students into the historical site where they can visit the most important places & museums around and provide them with important information and stories. In this experience, you follow the students in their city tour.
Higher retention rate
« Learning through VR is one of the most effective methods I know. You immediately feel more engaged because you feel as if you are really living a situation instead of just being informed.
Once the experiment is over, the retention rate is higher.
With VR, it’s easier to share information and convey a message. I can picture this technology implemented in many other schools very soon, for students training. In addition, the Uptale platform is very intuitive and easy to use compared to other softwares I had previously tried. »
— A student from THINK Global School
What are the next steps?
THINK Global School is thinking of creating other VR experiences, depending on the country they live in. What’s for sure, is that students are going to keep using VR for personal projects.
Right now those experiences are only displayed through VR headsets but they’d like to share them with schools they collaborate with (with web browser viewing or mobile viewing for instance).
Uptale within Think Global School
- 4 main experiences created
- 10+ students trained worldwide
- 15 cardboard and 3 Oculus
- 4 360° caméras