Published By: Las Cruces Sun-News, 2/10/2017

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Summary

Doña Ana Community College (DACC) and Virgin Galactic are teaming up to create a new educational outreach program. The partnership focuses on new virtual reality (VR) technologies and explores how they might be used in various settings and applications. It will begin with students using a VR simulation to learn concepts in aerospace technology.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of Article: 14.3

Extended Discussion Questions

• The article mentions several ways that VR technology could be applied to various disciplines.
  • What other tasks or fields might VR technology be applied to?
  • What might the beneficial impacts of those VR applications be? Who might they help?
  • Can you think of any potential negative impacts of using VR for those tasks?
• Besides aerospace, in what other fields of technology or engineering do you think education could most benefit from using VR?
  • What kinds of things might you be able to learn better using VR than in a physical lab? (Prompt: Compare examples from the article, of piloting a plane vs. examining protein molecules.)
• Do you think VR-based education could be a good solution at schools or in places that don’t have lab facilities? Why or why not? (Prompts: What do you need for the VR setups, and how much would that cost compared to a lab? What can you learn by manipulating virtual objects, and where do you need physical objects?)

Global Impact Learning Objectives:

• LO 7.1.1 Explain how computing innovations affect communication, interaction, and cognition.
• LO 7.2.1 Explain how computing has impacted innovations in other fields.
• LO 7.4.1 Explain the connections between computing and real-world contexts, including economic, social, and cultural contexts.

Global Impact Essential Knowledge:

• EK 7.2.1G Advances in computing as an enabling technology have generated and increased the creativity in other fields.

Other CSP Big Ideas:

• Idea 1 Creativity
• Idea 2 Abstraction

Banner Image: “Network Visualization – Violet – Offset Crop“, derivative work by ICSI. New license: CC BY-SA 4.0. Based on “Social Network Analysis Visualization” by Martin Grandjean. Original license: CC BY-SA 3.0.