Daniel Green is the Co-Chairman of the Mid-America Chapter of the Immersive Education Initiative, and has been involved in teaching coding skills with immersive technologies. He points to a lot of educational resources at code.org that they use including curriculums using MIT’s 2D, drag-and-drop gaming platform Scratch, the 3D platform of Alice, Greenfoot for teaching introductory Java programming, and then programming mods within Minecraft. There’s also MinecraftEDU, which has a community of educators who share their programs with each other.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.974] Daniel Green: My name is Daniel Green. I'm with the Oracle Corporation, and I'm a member of the K through 12 board for the Immersive Education Group. We work with lots of students in K through 12 and use different pieces of immersive education technology in order to work with students so that they can get the hang of creating their own environments, programming, 3D modeling, and all the pieces go with that.
[00:00:35.422] Kent Bye: Great. And so what type of experiences have you seen within the educational context when it comes to immersive technologies?
[00:00:43.268] Daniel Green: Sure. So in the education context, most of it is students who are consumers of the technology. So they might have seen an Oculus Rift, or a Kinect camera, or a Leap motion controller, but not been familiar with the technologies behind those. So they can feel they can create their own experience, or create their own environment. So, a lot of what we work towards is starting them off with something like a Scratch from MIT, Alice from Carnegie Mellon University, tools like that. There's a lot of interest in Minecraft, but there's a lot of people playing Minecraft but not making their own versions of it or modding it themselves. So a lot of what we strive to do from the education context is focus on things, workshops, projects, assignments, that focus on students creating their own pieces, creating their own games, creating their own animations. and generally tilt them towards being excited about making their own stuff instead of using something from somebody else. So that's the bulk of it and I find in especially through K-12 there's not a lot of time left in the day in the schedule and the curriculum and the pedagogy and so forth for them just to play around and mess with things and what happens if I do this and experiment with that as opposed to sort of a rote and repetition, you know, if it's computer science, here are the assignments and you will remember this language and the syntax. And there's a lot of emphasis put on syntax and memorization and maybe not enough time to create their own pieces, their own animations, their own stories, and so forth. So that's a lot of what we try and do and fill in the gaps where in a typical K-12 setting, they may not have opportunity for that.
[00:02:26.732] Kent Bye: So it sounds like you're really trying to tap into their own creative potential to be more engaged. And I'm curious, how do you measure the success of the different programs that you are doing in terms of either qualitative or quantitative feedback?
[00:02:42.026] Daniel Green: The best indicator, given a lot of what we end up, so we're not in the classroom 24-7, a lot of it is weekend workshops, things in the summer. So, one of the metrics is, you know, if they ask if they can do this at home, as opposed to, oh, I'm so glad I'm done with this class, I don't ever want to see this again. So, there's actually a pretty good summary of this if you go to code.org slash stats. And that shows a lot of what we're focused on. So that, you know, over time hopefully enough students come to a workshop or get excited about creating their own game, creating their own environment, animation, and so forth. Then we start to tip some of those pie charts towards having more students engaged in not just computer science, but science, technology, engineering, math, disciplines that lead to them showing a lot of what we have here at the Immersive Education Summit. So a lot of environments using Oculus Rift headset, some of them using Leap Motion Controller, things like that, that the students may be familiar with those in gaming mode. So you may have a Kinect camera with an Xbox 360 at home. And they may use that to play certain games. But that's kind of a consumer-oriented thing as opposed to, oh, look, if you fire this up and connect the Kinect camera, then we can write code that drives this thing. So in terms of metrics and how do we figure out are we successful, it's mostly if at the end if they're excited about doing it at home, and where can they download the software? That's what we're driving at, is they have a genuine interest in what do I do next? Where can I create this? And where do I get a hold of this at home or at school?
[00:04:17.233] Kent Bye: And so code.org, is that part of the organization that you run? And what's the mission of that website?
[00:04:23.770] Daniel Green: So, immersive education is not directly tied to, linked, or affiliated with Code.org, but a lot of what we've been trying in K-12 to get in front of the students, they have done a really good job of getting the word out to different schools to the point where we had the Computer Science Education Week event. Our goal as educators that participate in this was to get 10 million students worldwide to try the Code.org samples and just if they've never written any code before, to get them to try it, to try writing some code for one hour. It's called the Hour of Code event, hourofcode.org. And not only do we get 10 million students worldwide, I think we're up to about 36 million students at this point. And we can track that directly off the website. So although immersive education is not directly associated with code.org, it is something we're very interested and very proud of in terms of pointing educators to as a resource. As an example, one of the workshops when we get, literally, we get home from this conference, we're running a workshop and using code.org as some of the resources for one of our workshops for CodeCamp. And it's exceedingly good. It's something that already exists. It is materials already available, but it's also open. So if you had a wonderful idea in Scratch or Alice or Greenfoot or Minecraft or whatever, you can submit that into Code.org and that can be something that others can use as well. So it's a really good resource. It's not directly affiliated with Immersive Education, but we are very happy users of the site.
[00:05:57.465] Kent Bye: And those programs that you just mentioned, maybe describe what those programs are and how they're connected to Immersive Education.
[00:06:05.323] Daniel Green: Absolutely, yes. So some of those were mentioned in the keynote in the sessions today. So sort of in order, the first sort of lowest entry point is Scratch from MIT. So that's freely available at scratch.mit.edu. And that is an environment to do 2D drag and drop games and animations. So anything that's 2D, you can more or less create with Scratch. That was created and fostered and continues to be provided by the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten group. And it's available at scratch.mit.edu. And that is literally dragging in blocks to make the things on screen program. and do, you know, whether it's a story and animation, that sort of thing. So that's all 2D. And that also has a share online community component. So if you've done something you'd like to share with others, you can hit the share button, and everyone else can see that. And you can conversely look for things like, wow, I wonder if somebody's done a great game or a story about a certain topic, you can go find somebody that's already done that and you can remix that, change it yourself, and it will say, you know, your project's been remixed so many times. So the community is a substantial part of that because some of the students are really good at animation, some are really good at coding and programming, some are good at game design and game flow and so forth. So there'll be students that collaborate on projects and get together and group them in studios for different projects. So that's, first and foremost, Scratch is a 2D drag-and-drop gaming environment. I've had students as young as four and five, where they're just picking up reading, use the tool. And it's not terribly important that the blocks, you know, have words on them. They drag the blocks in and figure out what they do and go, oh, that must mean forever, as opposed to reading that. So that's like the lowest common denominator, the first thing I would start students with. Alice from Carnegie Mellon University, it's at alice.org. That's a 3D version of Scratch, if you will, in that there are 3D scenes that you fill up with characters, you know, things like dragons and all manner of things. There are things that fly, there are human beings, so you can assemble this 3D scene. and then you program it. So in addition to 3D layout and being able to manipulate a camera in world, you also have the ability to program those and effectively put together a 3D game out of that. So that's one of the next most common jump off points from Scratch is to get from 2D to 3D and still use drag and drop blocks. One of the other common points, especially if a lot of students have an in point of Minecraft as a common interest now, which is very very complex. If we just started off and said let's all do Minecraft, that's a lot like trying to manufacture an airplane component and put it in place in the plane that you're in while you're flying. It's about that complex. So a lot of the students want to go as quickly as they can to, you know, make a Minecraft mod, something like that. Another version of Scratch that is a Java version where you're not dragging and dropping blocks, but you're coding. You're actually writing a little bit of Java code in their framework. It's called Greenfoot for University of Kent, and that's at greenfoot.org. All these are freely available, by the way. So as long as you have Linux, Windows, or Mac, you're able to download these and run these programs. In the case of Scratch, that's web-based. And then Greenfoot is an environment to do almost exactly what you're doing in Scratch, some sort of animation and simulation in the game in 2D, with the difference that instead of dragging blocks back and forth, you're actually writing a little bit of Java code. And it's a very simple IDE. It's nowhere near as complex as jumping straight into an Eclipse or a NetBeans or an IntelliJ. I refer to those as the 747 of interfaces, right? You want to learn to fly? Great. Here's the keys to the 747. Let us know if you actually make it off the runway. probably not the best learning environment. So we usually traverse from something like Scratch, sometimes Alice if they're into 3D, and then in Greenfoot to get the hang of Java coding, Alice has a component of Java coding as well. And then lastly, we'll go up into something that is more traditional game development. So if you were to tune into something like a Humble Bundle marathon from some of the independent game developers, A lot of them have a Java IDE up. They're doing graphic design. They're doing the coding, the pixel stuff, the manipulation of art, and hooking that to code. And so that's a place I wouldn't start kids, especially if they were like nine years old and K through 12. But after they've got experience with Scratch, got experience with Alice, got experience with Greenfoot, sort of actually coding in Java and familiar with hooking graphic asset resources to those, we would go into something like a Minecraft, which is sort of the lowest common denominator, you know, multiplayer user world. A lot of adults are just absolutely amazed that it's so pixelated, but kids don't really care. It's still really cool because it's multi-user and it's a big community behind that. So that's one of the endpoints, rather than just say, oh, you know Java, you're great, no problem, and say you're certified. but actually start to look at making modifications to Minecraft and in some cases making mods that you would be able to distribute to other people and say hey look I made this Minecraft mod that does something Minecraft doesn't and I had to use Java to do it and I learned that from Greenfoot and I learned that from scratch. So, there are other tools, of course, but those are some of the big hits towards getting into a multi-user virtual environment. Minecraft is sort of an odd, clunky, blocky one as compared to something like Second Life, but it's very accessible. Again, I've had very young students be just whizzes at Minecraft because it's easy to access, it's easy to build, and it's easy to mine and dig and so forth.
[00:11:32.473] Kent Bye: It reminds me of Lego building blocks when I was a kid. It feels like the Minecraft is the Legos of the 21st century.
[00:11:39.555] Daniel Green: Absolutely. The sessions we've given, sometimes in conjunction with Oracle and Java, sometimes independent, that's probably one of the best explanations that we've had is, OK, hi, I'm here, and I've never heard of Minecraft before. What is it? And frequently, somebody will pipe in with, it's an infinite bucket of Legos. And in terms of the Minecraft modding, If there's a Lego brick that you don't think is there that should be there, make your own. So yeah, Legos is a phenomenal explanation of what Minecraft is.
[00:12:07.851] Kent Bye: And so what other kind of educational activities have you seen people doing in Minecraft?
[00:12:14.306] Daniel Green: So yeah, there is a huge resource. There's a whole community of educators that have gotten agreement from the creators of Minecraft to make an education specific version. Because if you think of it, if you were a teacher and you just fired up Minecraft and said, OK, kids, let's go, all three students burrow down in the ground. You never see them again. You have to go chase him down and say, hey, teleport this guy over here. Hey, hey, come back. So you spend a lot of time herding cats, right? So there's a whole community called Minecraft EDU. And you can access that at minecraftedu.com. So there's controls for teachers, like, hey, everybody, freeze. If you can't mine right now, come over to this place where we're going to talk about the lesson and the curriculum. But more importantly, there are just a vast number of educators that have come together and started to make their lesson plans, and more importantly, their worlds available. So it's hard to just articulate on an audio feed. It would be much better if you went to minecraftedu.com slash worlds, I believe it is. There's a whole map and list of different worlds they've created. with teachers with curriculum in mind. So there's things like Common Core Math. Sounds pretty boring, frankly, unless you're doing something interesting with the math. So there are Minecraft EDU worlds specifically for dealing with Common Core Mathematics. There is a whole, literally, worlds of humanity stuff. They call it World of Humanities. And there's ancient China, there's ancient Rome, There's all the buildings block for block created and imported into the world where they can go and have a parallel place. It might be something simple like build a building with volume greater than 250 blocks. And there's a lot of other stuff you can do as well. So this single individual speaking doesn't have a big enough imagination to encompass all the things you could do with that. Fortunately, there's an entire community of educators and we're tipping over 800 to 1,000 teachers and using Minecraft in schools, Minecraft EDU in specific, to do things like, you know, circuitry. You can use redstone wiring in Minecraft and cover all the Boolean logic gates that if I were to hold a class with solder and wire and say we're going to build an 8-bit ALU, I might get some kids to show up. But if I can say, hey, we're going to build an 8-bit ALU in Minecraft, oh man, the class is full, right? So there's lots of examples. I'm not doing a very good job of relaying some of the kinds of things, but it's humanities, it's mathematics, it's physics. All of these things are available as lessons and materials that you can use from Minecraft EDU.
[00:14:41.790] Kent Bye: There's also the Oculus Rift being able to integrate with fully 3D environments. I'm curious if there's any plugins for Alice or if you've been using the Minecraft mod at all to be able to start to use the Oculus Rift in virtual reality with some of the specific uses of these games within immersive education context.
[00:15:01.602] Daniel Green: Yeah, so one difference in say a Minecraft, Scratch, and Alice and so forth, well actually even to differentiate, everything up to Minecraft that we've talked about is free, freely available, so if you have a computer you can download it and you're in. When you get into hardware pieces, some of the other examples we use are things like Pico boards from MIT for input sensors. Raspberry Pi is in Arduinos or popular pieces, but those are all hardware. So those are things, as opposed to a free software download, you have to go buy. And in specific, with the Oculus Rift just now coming into its second beta, we have educators asking about it. If we were to buy some of these for our schools, how much do they cost? What does it work with? That kind of thing. So there's interest to say, that looks interesting. What does it mean to go over there? So it's interesting and useful in that a lot of games, Unity engines, things that are current video games, work with Oculus Rift already. Minecraft being one of them, even though the creator of Minecraft has said, oh my goodness, Facebook bought them, never mind. That's more of a personal statement than any technology piece. But there's interest in going there, it's just it's early enough days in conjunction with a $300 plus hardware purchase to get in the door for that one. That it's looked at as an adjunct, something that if, for instance, you're doing Minecraft EDU, that might be really interesting as an add-on, say for a library or a school or a museum to allow those people to experience the thing they've done on a 2D screen with mouse and keyboard to now navigate in world and be more immersive about that. So there's a lot of interest, but given that the hardware itself is just now approaching its second beta and not something you can, for instance, buy at Best Buy. I think it's early days. So we're seeing a lot of interest in proposals that include that and lots of questions about, wow, that's amazing, how do we get one and so forth. A different example I'll put up, but related, would be Leap Motion Controller. That was in beta for a while, and I got one of those, and other developers got those as well, and went, wow, this really works, and here's what you can do with it, and here's the app store and all that stuff. But now that it's available at Best Buy for 70 bucks, you know, more or less, that's something that, you know, is less risky to say, well, what happens if the beta didn't go well and the company folds or whatever? So early days, lots of interest in how do we proceed to go there? And especially if that's additive to something we already do, as opposed to, well, it's very special, something specific for that hardware and only working with that hardware, right? So early days, but lots of interest.
[00:17:31.855] Kent Bye: What are some of the things that you've been doing with the Leap Motion with these kids and what kind of interactions have you seen them do with this?
[00:17:39.643] Daniel Green: So early days with that, even though Leap Motion is now available at Best Buy, a lot of the programs we work with, workshops and so forth, we'll bring one in to get the idea that this is a piece of hardware that represents an input much in the way that if you look at an Iron Man movie, Tony Stark's doing a bunch of stuff in the air and waving things around and things are showing up. There's a lot of alternative input that's not keyboard, that's not mouse, that represents the ability to do things they couldn't do just with a mouse or a keyboard. So we're looking at how do we hook up the Leap Motion to Scratch? something they already know, but now you can attach that in a way and do something with characters on screen that you didn't have that input. The Kinect camera is another one that's been out for a while. The new Kinect, the X-Blade, it's just like Leap Motion. There's a cooler, better, amazing version coming out that does a lot better stuff. The Leap Motion in particular is kind of interesting because they basically turned on some different software and suddenly it does motion tracking a lot better. Which is great. So we're looking at how do we interface those kinds of things into stuff the students are already doing. So stuff like Scratch in particular, and there's a whole public extension sets that you can attach other things like a Lego WeDo, a Lego NXT robot. And there's mechanisms to hook in things like a Leap Motion, the Oculus Rift camera and so forth, just by extending the current environment into something that is relatively new. So most of what we're looking at is taking what the students are already doing and how do we incorporate that additional hardware piece, that additional alternative input in a way that allows them to do something they weren't able to do before. So early days on that one too, because again that's hardware and we have to work out filling out grants in order to get a set of those for a classroom, what it means to, you know, oops, we run Oculus Rift and somebody broke it, now what? So that hardware component is a little, has a higher risk In it, then freely available software downloads. If it trashes the computer, the IT person reloads the computer, and you download the stuff again. So early days, but most of it is additive to what they're already doing. They're already creating games, telling stories, doing animations. What is it that Kinect camera, the motion controller, the Oculus Rift, what can that bring to the equation of something you already do to make it even more powerful, as opposed to a standalone start over again with just that piece of hardware?
[00:19:57.485] Kent Bye: Yeah, and being part of the Immersive Education Initiatives Board, what are some of the design principles that you'd say are critical for creating an immersive education curriculum, and maybe some things that work and things that you find don't work?
[00:20:13.607] Daniel Green: So first and foremost, engagement. If it's not something that the students wouldn't do if you weren't there, if there's not interest to do it in the first place, hey everybody, let's memorize mathematical formulas and then take a test. Sorry, not going to work. That's necessary to do assessment, but in and of itself not compelling. So, a lot of what would be curriculum in that guise would be, you know, can we use tools that they already like, like a Minecraft, or, you know, creating a video game. So, I'll give you an example. One of the games we run through using Scratch and Greenfoot, we do it in Scratch, then we turn around and do it in Greenfoot using Java code, is Asteroids, which In and of itself doesn't seem to have curriculum just sort of leaping off the page. However, we have to go through and build up a momentum vector and we use sine and cosine and maintain a vector and variables throughout the state. And here's the, I would love to rewrite or provide alternative curriculum so that the compelling thing was my game works right now. That before, when I didn't have the math right, the ship wasn't going across the screen, and it wasn't wrapping around, and it wasn't doing all this stuff. And it's hard to express how compelling it is for students to get their game right and have something that works, as opposed to, OK, I memorized that third formula, and I know Sohcahtoa, and I know something about trigonometry now. But rather, if you have a working game that people can play, that you can publish, That's powerful. So I would sort of rephrase some of the existing curriculum, not to rewrite it, but rather to include working, engaging, immersive examples. So even if it's a 2D game, you may not be, you know, in 3D, maneuvering around with a headset, but even if it's a 2D game, there are compelling pieces of that that you have to solve mathematics problems, spatial reasoning, logic, all those pieces in a way where if you have a functioning game, you've done it yourself, you've solved some problems that you can now turn around and be at a completion and an assessment point with some of those subjects like math, logic, and reasoning that you absolutely, if you didn't have those things in place, you couldn't make the game work. So I would phrase a lot of those as, here is a game to create, and in order to get through those, these are the curriculum milestones I would have them do in order to make the game work.
[00:22:29.687] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for these immersive technologies like virtual reality and what they can provide for education?
[00:22:38.533] Daniel Green: I will quote someone much smarter than myself, Seymour Papert from MIT. One of the things he was constantly exhorting people to do was to create Mathland. And that sounds a little odd in and of itself, but the context there is you will hear people say something like, that person just didn't have a head for math. And he likens that to French. And to hear someone say, well, that person just didn't have a head for French is not something you hear commonly expressed. Because you know darn well, if that person grew up in France, they would speak French perfectly well, as you and I speak English and potentially other languages, because they grew up there. And that was not something that, oh, there were tests and all this other stuff. That was just part of living in that environment. So his corollary or his expansion from that is, OK, if you're having a hard time with math, we need to figure out what it is for the subject that's being problematic in the same way that living in France to learn French is. So, ideally, if we can use some of the, you know, like name off some of the nice pieces. Leap motion controller, Kinect camera, Oculus Rift headset, and so forth. Some of the things that we're playing with here at the Immersive Education Conference that are a lot of fun. If we can construct something like Mathland, Englishland, you know, Physicsland, in a way where it's at least as compelling to be able to create a game, make something work in-world, so that you don't even think hard about the fact that you've just solved something that's complicated because there's something fun about that. In the same way that living in France, picking up, learning the French language would be okay, What I hope the ultimate goal is to provide experiences and opportunities for students so that they have something that looks, smells, and feels like math land, like history land, and so forth, so that it is at least as fun and compelling and engaging to do what we do in school classrooms today in a very, you know, kind of formal setting as it is what they do when they go away from school and they go play, you know, Call of Duty or whatever it is that they do that is engaging and if left alone, they'll do by themselves. make it that level of fun so that the schoolwork doesn't, I've had students say, this is fun, can we do this tomorrow? Like, well, yeah, as long as the teacher's okay with that, yes, because you are doing something that's constructive, productive, and creative, and those three things put together as something that happens at school is wonderful. So, that is where I hope we go with immersive education so that those tools and technologies enable an environment that is at least as fun as what they do for entertainment.
[00:25:15.532] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:25:17.213] Daniel Green: Thank you very much.
