At Arizona State, student loans enter virtual realm
At most universities, student loan money helps to pay for tuition, room and board, and textbooks.
This semester, biology students at Arizona State University will use those same funds to pay for a new kind of educational tool: virtual reality headsets.
Long popular with gamers drawn to immersive fantasy worlds, VR headsets are increasingly being used by scientists, doctors and even the military.
Wherever there are people who need to be trained in complex environments or on high-priced machines with little room for error, there is a potential role for VR, according to Michael Angilletta, the associate director of undergraduate programs in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State.
Angilletta said the desire to provide students with engaging realworld experience prompted school officials to partner with Google and Labster — a VR development company — to create simulated environments for online students enrolled in a general biology course. Students will use VR headsets to complete the course’s lab requirements.
Last week, several dozen students tried the $400 Lenovo Mirage Solo headset for a test run before labs kick off this fall. School officials claim ASU’s online biology course is the first in the nation to offer virtual reality labs.
“The virtual environment allows for very novel and creative problem-solving games and skill-learning,” Angilletta said, noting that about 150 headsets will be available to students to borrow in October. “We want them to have the full experience of what it’s like to be in a lab or to be in Antarctica studying seals.”
One of the students’ virtual assignments involves working in an animated lab, where they must don a lab coat and gloves before taking blood samples from basketball players to determine their glucose levels.
Another scenario sends students to a distant planet with a team of scientists. The goal: figuring out how to construct a space station without harming the planet’s exotic biodiversity. Angilletta said that for that scenario, a team of ASU biology professors and Labster designers attempted to create animals and fauna that bear little resemblance to living organisms found on Earth. In another exoplanet scenario, Angilletta said, students are forced to diagnose why their team’s crops are dying, placing the mission at risk.
Angilletta said when he’s immersed in the simulations himself, he has trouble taking off the goggles. Eventually, he believes, the VR will include gloves that provide users with a tactile sensory experience.
“The fact I can get lost in that means students are going to get lost in these problems and feel like they’re real problems,” he said. “We think they’ll be far more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at a flat computer screen.”
A 2016 study concluded that virtual reality can be a successful substitute for real-world lab experiences. European researchers randomly selected 189 students from an undergraduate biology course and had them practice “streaking out bacteria on agar plates in a virtual environment.”