Virtual reality in education can enhance student learning and engagement. VR education has been shown to help inspire students worldwide to pursue paths such as science because they can get firsthand experience in it.
A study by Beijing iBokan has conducted that Students have 30% better knowledge retention with VR.
VR technology can also help students retain information better, as they’re interacting with it.
We tend only to remember 10% of what we read but remember 90% of what we say & do. This favors studying with virtual reality, as students can solve challenging and real-life problems that will help them develop their logical thinking & problem-solving skills.
Benefits of Virtual reality in Education
Visualizing Hard To Understand Concepts
Some concepts like mathematics and physics are hard to understand for visual learners.
This is where virtual reality is making massive changes. VR can help visualize certain physics laws or mathematics functions that aren’t possible to do on a blackboard.
Being able to visualize complex problems makes them easier to comprehend and remember.
Increase Retention
Providing facts to students and making them remember it isn’t the same as being educated; a lot is lost in the process.
Most students will cram the data in their heads before the exam and forget about it soon after.
As mentioned before, virtual reality can help increase student knowledge retention.
Learn by Doing, Not Memorizing
Some subjects like medicine are extremely difficult to master from paper alone, and providing test subjects for students to learn is challenging and dangerous.
Virtual reality can solve these problems by having medical students go through various potential surgery simulations without the risk of injuring someone.
It’s the same technology that teaches pilots how to fly.
Field Trips Without The Trip
Virtual reality trips can be a fantastic way to engage students in subjects like history or geography. Seeing certain parts of the world with their own eyes can inspire them and help them learn about other cultures.
These experiences are much more enriching than just reading about them; seeing other people’s culture is as close students can get as experiencing it firsthand.
Inspire Creativity
Giving students new tools to play around with can inspire their creativity.
Students can use VR to create their worlds and solutions to particular problems, test them in the virtual environment and get real-time feedback.
Test Out Different Fields
Most students have no idea what they want to do with their life and who can blame them.
Getting exposure to different career paths is essential in the learning process, and VR can help people test out their dreams before fully committing to them.
Work can seem very different to an outsider than to someone doing the work themselves.
When To Use Virtual Reality In The Classroom
VR is a powerful tool that can help students learn more, inspire them to become scientists, and teach them new concepts they couldn’t possibly grasp on paper.
However, it’s not the be-all and end-all.
Human interaction is still a fundamental social and learning experience, VR should be used as a supplemental training tool.
Some subjects aren’t suitable for VR in nature. Learning grammar or similarly abstract concepts aren’t a good fit for VR.
STEM fields will be a much better fit for VR, and that’s where VR should apply it the most.
Teachers can still use other tools such as quizzes to improve their student retention rates.
Conclusion
Virtual reality in education has shown to increase student retention rates and learning capabilities.
The field is still in it’s early stages, and as virtual reality becomes more affordable, it’s surely going to grow even further.
We would advise all schools to consider adding virtual reality to the curriculum.
If you want to learn more about virtual reality, we recommend reading our 5 benefits of virtual reality post
