Local schools come to Red Oak for virtual reality program training

RED OAK — Students and educators from several Southwest Iowa schools came to Red Oak High School last week to learn about an innovative educational tool.

Representatives from Glenwood, East Mills, Farragut, Sidney, Clarke and Winterset school districts participated in the Virtual Reality Education Pathfinders two-day training session Tuesday and Wednesday.

“A lot of students know how to word process and create spreadsheets, but what many students don’t know how to do is to take technology and use it to create something,” Red Oak High School Principal Jedd Sherman said. “This is a training ground to show how technology is used to create things and that’s something that we’re not really emphasizing across the nation.”

Rex Kozak, a representative of VREP and also the Principal at East Marshall High School in LeGrand said the ultimate goal for VREP is to change how everyone thinks and about getting students to take on the responsibility of understanding the material versus relying on the teacher to provide the information.

“We are so focused on testing data, testing results, that we’re really not improving overall with student learning and student production, we’re kind of leveling off,” Kozak said. “We have to re-engage the student back into learning, back into being a participant.”

Those attending had the chance to work in break out sessions with such programs as Blender, which is a 3-D graphic creation open source software, as well as architectural and computer-aided design and drafting software programs.

“The point is to show students the purposes of virtual reality and also to teach students to create with technology versus just being the recipient of information,” Sherman said.

One key demonstration shown to the schools was from BodyViz, from the Iowa State University Research Park in the Cyber Innovation Institute in Ames. BodyViz presented their software, which takes MRI and CAT scan images and composes them into 3-D visualizations. These visualizations can be manipulated and moved around, with the use of an X-Box 360 controller.

The software gained national attention when it was featured on the TV show The Biggest Loser.

Sherman said he would love to add BodyViz at the High School, adding it can be used for all the science classes, even physics, as well as the agriculture classes, where the program can be used for composing CAT scan images of animals.

“I would like to see it become an interdisciplinary tool. Right now, this class of virtual technology is teaching students to design, but the other piece is to use in an interdisciplinary fashion, such as having other teachers of other content areas using technology to explore their content area,” Sherman said.

Kozak said these programs allow the district to branch out farther and connect with the business world, providing knowledgeable and more disciplined workers.

“The industry needs these type of workers or these type of mind-sets and they’re not getting them, even after four-year degrees,” Kozak said. “They need to come out better prepared, better equipped with more tools and more understanding.”