Integrating Virtual Reality

I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hiread. And this is Al Pelletz, a podcast featuring tips for Ad teachers.

We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Hey Al Pelletz, welcome back. This is Brian here with Becky and Mike and we are here once again by the Al Pellet and we are excited to have another great conversation about some cool technology, cool things that we got going on. And Justin's pulling, we are so glad that you are here with us today, Justin.

Good to be here. So to get things started, tell us all about you and what you got going on down there. My name is Justin Pulli. I'm a assistant professor at Dankia Tarleton State University.

I made a deal with Ag Education and Agricultural Mechanics classes. And my whole topic or area of interest is using virtual reality in these classes. Most of these classes are hands-on, skill-based type classes. And we are working on different ways of incorporating alternate and virtual environments to help better our students and prepare them for different skills.

I think that's a great place to start. We talk about the term virtual reality quite a bit. And so can you define or conceptualize what you are talking about when you say virtual reality for the conversation today? And will the robot overlords take over the entire planet and kill us all?

Careful how you answer this is the second or third time you ask this question. That seems to be the thing that I'm not happy with any of the introduction. Ryan's really hoping for robot take over actually. Well hopefully with this virtual reality you can control the robot overlords and we don't have to worry too much with them.

But those robot overlords that we're talking about, it's just a 3D-generated computer generated environment. You could however you decide to set it up. You could have it designed to generate whatever type of environment or whatever type of things that you wanted to work with. For example, most of mine are kind of shopper-related stuff.

So we got the environment set up to look like a Agnakanq shop. So that sounds really cool. So what's our overall topic we're going to be focusing today in that space of virtual reality? What you're doing some really cool stuff in?

The topic that we're brought in for was just to introduce this one main experience that we've got going so far. And this is a safe tractor operation experience. And what we've tried to do is we've tried to provide students with an alternate virtual reality for them to practice safe tractor operation techniques. I know a lot of the issues that we run into when we start getting students, especially high school and potentially junior high students on machines, is what if they hit something?

What if they run something over? This provides them an opportunity to get in there and practice that without the fear of running something over, without the fear of hitting anybody or anything. And allow them to practice in the skills before they get on a real machine and actually start testing. So Justin, I hear the safety of this kind of things here.

But I'm going to teach this. I got a tractor out back. We can just hop on the tractor and go, what if I'm not real sure or comfortable about the technology side of things? Help me through that.

What do I need to know as the teacher to be able to really use the resources that you're talking about here? First, you need to pause and picture Brian running out the back door and you'll get real on board with me on it. As long as you can sit down, put the headset on and work through a series of instructions and learn how to work the controllers. Most of the stuff you don't need Wi-Fi to hook up to it so you don't have to worry about going into the settings and really adjusting anything.

As long as you can open up the menu, work through the different apps that are on there and open it up. Most of these experiences provide pretty good information and instructions to get you through from point and to finish the experience. Several of the teachers that I've worked with, we've ranged from younger and their late 20s to older teachers who have been teaching for 20, 25 years, we're working with these headsets and all of them, they had their struggling blocks. But we're able to get from point and point B and get that tractor drove around the course and back to this parking spot.

So you've just got to be open to working with that technology. As I'm sure you all know, getting teachers to incorporate technology, especially older teachers who are not technology savvy, it can be a real challenge sometimes. I think even with the tech savvy piece, you talk about setting up environments and looking through some of these things, what do teachers need to know when it comes to how ready does this come to use? I think we've talked a little bit with some folks around virtual reality or welding, which I think might feel a little bit more familiar.

But we're also in this conversation really thinking about a broader world of virtual reality in terms of the environments that you might be working with. So what does it look like to explore those things beyond just maybe some of the virtual reality that we maybe jump to right away in our minds as far as thinking about where can we actually be applying this? Yeah, so it's pretty, it's pretty darn key depending on where you get the experience from. I had no coding, no VR development, any type of background, and we've put together these VR experiences that are, you put on the headset and you're ready to go as far as operating it.

I started kind of making the role as a content developer, so to speak, so that I bridge that gap between our ag ed topics and then our virtual reality technology. And what does that look like inside of there? So when I sit down and help people think this through, I was like, how turnkey can we make this so that there's nothing that people have to worry about, do I need to be able to do this, or do I need to be able to do that? It's ready to go for you.

I jumped from the tracker safety piece, to I've got an electrical wiring, kind of sandbox mode that we can wire up different circuits with lights, light switches, frame lights on, all the way to floral design certifications that we can, we can test out those different levels of floral design without spending all the money on your flowers and everything that we know cost way too much to be wasting on practicing those type of designs like that. So as you look through this, Justin, what tips, what recommendations do you have for teachers as they start to integrate VR into their curriculum and into their programs? As you start to incorporate it, one is put the headset on for yourself and run through it as many times as it takes for you to get comfortable with it. As we know, we tell our student teachers, we tell our teachers as detailed of instructions that you can give, that's going to result in you being asked less questions.

And when you throw this type of technology piece into that, that's even more questions that you're going to get. I don't know how many questions I feel that I'm like, how to do this or how to do that and how to do this. And so getting in there, experiencing the environment, the experience for yourself, you can answer those questions, you know what it's going to be like in the students' shoes while they're working through it. And I'd say that's probably one of the bigger pieces.

The second tip would be to really sit down and look at your lesson. How can this piece of VR technology fit within your lesson as a supplemental piece of instruction and not just decide activity or not just a game for students to try out? I think that's probably the second biggest thing I saw and heard teachers say that, well, they thought this was just a game. Well, no, this is a supplemental piece of instruction that we're trying to tie to your lesson.

So really having that pedagogical purpose, that's how I always frame it, is a pedagogical purpose behind this activity. Why are we doing it? I think it's so big, Justin, is to be thinking about what I hear you say, and it's so wise for us is that this is a teaching tool. And we need to make sure that the student objectives, the student learning objectives, still drives what we're doing.

And that we don't make it all about the new toy. That is really just about what we're still trying to teach them how to operate equipment properly or full design or whatever it is that the learning objectives. This is the tool to help us get there. Yeah, exactly.

And this is a technology that kids are going to have at home. Their parents can go down to Walmart and buy one and bring it home for a birthday gift. And so this is something that they already potentially have used at home. And that's one of the other things that I saw coming from the students and the teachers was just how much it actually promoted more engagement with that topic.

I mean, you take something like tractor safety. Nobody really wants to focus on safety too much. It gets boring after a little bit. And as much as we need it, we have to shift away from it.

But you can reinvigorate interest in a topic like that by incorporating this type of technology, making it competitive, making it more engaging, and so on. And to that end, can you talk a little bit about your experience? What do the students think about this? As they were going through this, what was their kind of takeaways?

As they were doing the tractor opposite, tractor operating experience that you gave them, what do they like it? Do they not like it? Did they learn anything that worked? They thought it was pretty cool.

We looked at their user experience. We wanted to know how they felt inside of there. And essentially what we had was we had it split up in three different areas, was kind of like a safety content review. They had a driving course that they could physically mount the tractor, put it in drive, and then use the triggers on their controllers and actually press the gas and go forward and navigate through some cones.

They could run over cones, they could hit cones, they could drive way off into the grass field out there. And we had several kids somehow hit a cone, knock it over, but then also run over the cone and roll the tractor. So we provided several different methods in there that they can really play around with and experience with, like to drive that tractor. So they all thought it was really cool.

And then those more experienced kids that had driven tractors a little bit, it allowed them to kind of get in there and really play around with some different things. We even hooked a little trailer to the back of it and they had to back it into install and pull it out. And those students that had the experience, did they find that the virtual reality experience was still similar as to what they had experienced before when driving actually equipment? They found there was some similarities, but then they also did find some disconnects.

It wasn't as realistic as driving a real tractor. Obviously it's a computer-generated environment, but it allowed them to continue working through. Let's say one student drives a tractor pretty good, but he's never quite gotten down the habit of backing a trailer. They could hop on this and practice backing that trailer up a bit.

And actually, we would take them to sit them down in chairs as if they were actually in a tractor seat and then have them turn around and look, like, all right, I'm actually backing this trailer, but I'm just sitting down in a chair. So we tried to provide those higher level experiences for the students that maybe had a little bit more experience, but needed some more practice. That's for the ones that had no experience, and it wasn't free for all for them. They were able to get in there and really play around and figure out what some of those controllers were meant for and what these different things would do.

I think just even that idea of how do we move this from something cool to practice and those little things, even like, I'm going to be sit down in a chair, I think, if I think about how my needs and nephews use their VR things and the things that they're able to do, we have not introduced those to the Haudad House just yet. But even thinking before about these environments that you can create, that this is something that's already in people's houses. My mind immediately went to signing virtual homework. But even I think my immediate thought was like, how do you keep the, there's a novelty of this is new, this is something I use at home, this is something I like to do at home.

My nephew, I think last year on his, what's your favorite activity thing playing with my VR? But I think that that balance of how do I maintain, do I want to maintain some novelty even with this? And I think about the utility and the use of it and not just having to be like, okay, we're getting out the VR again. Like, okay, we're getting out the case, we're getting out the, like, the, the, how do you maintain that, that, that usefulness along with the novelty as you think about the pedagogical purpose of those VR equipment?

Yeah. And I think to answer your question for there, I think the first place we got to start is working on developing more content. You know, there's plenty of different VR games that are out there, but when we start sitting down and looking at educational apps, educational experiences, especially at agri-related experiences, there's just not that many. And so I think this is where it kind of falls on us is as educators to sit down and help bridge this gap between the technology and what we know, and what we know students need to know and help develop some of those different experiences.

As far as like maintaining that novelty, my electrical wiring class, for example, I'm working on getting them a set of headsets that they can take home for about six to eight weeks out of the years, we're doing our different wiring activities in lab and each week we do a different wiring scenario. And so allowing them to take that home, they're practicing something new every week. And so it's not, hopefully it's not getting boring for them, but they're practicing something new and they're still getting to work out those different scenarios. So, Jesse, you've talked about this a little bit, but if I'm an actor out there listening to this that has not quite gotten into the VR game, where do they start?

How do I, you know, if I was going to say, hey, okay, this sounds great. I hear what he was talking about. I want to use this teaching tool to be part of my curriculum. What's the entry cost?

How do I get started in something like this? Yeah, so there's several, once you start looking into it, there's a bunch of different types of headsets. I think the most readily available headset is going to be your meta quest headsets. The Quest 2s and the Quest 3s are the most popular out there right now.

I believe the Quest 3s, they're the newest version that's came out and they're about $4.99. The Quest 2s, I believe, have been discounted back to $2.99 or even $3.99. So, and as I always gave them most of these teachers the opportunity to use these are like, well, how much does one of these cost? You know, I've got $1,000 that I'm ready to spend right now that I could get to three of these depending on how much they cost.

And so, I think that's the easiest place to get in. If you even have a little bit of funds or technology type funds that you can use to get at least one headset, that's enough to get you in the door. If you still don't look around to like what type of headsets are out there, I'll call on YouTube. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials and videos going through the different types of headsets, which one is the best, which one may work for this type.

But that would be the first place that you could really start learning a bit more about that is taking a look at some of the different YouTube content creators for virtual reality technology and seeing what's out there. But entry costs relatively well for a headset like this. And obviously, there's more expensive ones. But most of the experience is online as well.

They may cost a few bucks, but most of them are free, especially the educational ones. There's usually not a lot of cost tied to the tractor safety one that we have out there. It's free right now. Main thing was just pushing those out there and getting more content out there rather than having to make an educator pay for something again.

So with that, how do people find your experience? So yeah, our specific experience is located on a other platform called SideQuest, which is a VR uploading software that can install directly on the headset. And you can run apps directly from this app onto your headsets. And it's just labeled as a tractor safety driving experience if they want to look more into it.

I've got a few public videos on YouTube, like walking them through the entire experience and kind of what it looks like and what to expect, as well as other kind of different videos we've tied that into as well safety related videos. Well, I think one of the things too. So and we probably can share some of those links in the podcast notes if you'd like to share those. But the other part of that is that egg teachers, if you have an interest, just try it.

You can't really mess it up. It's not like taking them, you know, heaven forbid, taking a tractor during the school day and actually running it into the side of the, you know, the ag shop or the ag farm building, you know, you can get in there, you can run over whatever you want and not have to worry about anything. The only thing that you've got to take care of is just the technology itself. And aside from that, you know, once you get it, probably getting, probably becoming friends with your IT guys would probably be pretty helpful.

So that way they can stay up to date on that updates on it and, you know, make sure it works right, get it connected to the Wi-Fi and so on. So as a teacher, just try it, see how it works, get with your IT people, get with your admin, show the admin, you know, what those kids can do with it. I think that's the biggest thing that aside from getting teachers and students to really use it is admin don't know anything about it. You know, showing them what they can, what your students can do, what you can do with it.

It'll, it'll peak their interest as well. Well, Justin, that's, that's fantastic. Really appreciate the tips that you've given us. And I think, you know, to go back up where you started us and where you start with all this is that really goes down to your teaching purpose.

And then you use this to enhance your, your pedagogical purpose that you were talking about there. And I think the same thing here is helping your administrators see that if you're a teacher, you want to do this, helping you be a learning tool, that you're not just getting it because it's the new shiny object to be, to be getting here. So you've given us some great, great tips and advice. So you're doing some really cool things down there at Tarleton and really appreciate you're sharing that with us today.

Everything that you, that you're going to give us, we were happy to put on our show notes so that people can find those links, find the experiences that you have available for them to do and really find ways to use some of this really cool VR technology in our school-based ag ed classroom. So, Josh and thank you for sharing with us and being with us today here on Al pellets. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Al pellets. Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay connected and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by the Al pellets saying, thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Al pellets tips for ag teachers.