Taran Christensen
August 2017

Building collaborative tools, a cohesive AR/VR experience, and a procedural API for use in teaching programming to kids with VR collaboration as a driving motivator.

Teaching middle school kids programming is an ambitious task. Several factors complicated their learning beyond a standard student of computer science, one of which lies in proper motivation. We hope to alleviate this by incorporating VR/AR into their learning, and allowing for students to collaborate with one another in a virtual world.

Teaching materials for this project are being constructed for use at the Pacific Science Center at a summer VR “boot camp”. Kids will learn the basic fundamentals of programming: syntax, if statements, for loops.. while they construct their own games or experiences that they and their classmates may experience in VR/AR.

Students will be able to experience their virtual worlds with an HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Google Tango capable phone. Tools built in this project utilize the networked capability of the CRCS to allow students to experience virtual worlds together, using multiple devices, or just on their development environments, allowing a lot of flexibility for teaching and learning.