Students step into a virtual fishing job to collect data and build equations, and teachers say it makes complex math easier to grasp.
Teachers try to meet students where they are, finding ways to make a lesson relate to things they like to do. One school near Dallas Love Field says they may have cracked the code when it comes to teaching math.
NBC 5’s Wayne Carter has the story.
"I find math hard for me, which kind of makes me somewhat dislike it," said Sophia Cox, a student at Uplift Williams School in Dallas. To help students like Sophia succeed, Uplift Williams invested in Virtual Reality goggles, bringing tech into the classroom that these kids are already familiar with.
"In a PS5, you use a controller to use to, like, move around, do whatever you want to do. In the VR world you honestly use two controllers but they're different for your hands," said Jayden Cruz, another student in the class. From the real world, it's hard to tell, but the students standing in the classroom, moving their arms, are working as commercial fishermen in a virtual world.
"They had to classify some fish that they caught using the VRs on two types of nets, and they collected some data," said Felipe Monroy, teacher. The data he's talking about are their math equations. By taking it off paper and putting it in these virtual-but-real-world scenarios, it's helped the students reel in success.
"It really helps me understand the formulas of slope more. It helps me, it helps me because I get to see the line, see how it changes differently as I move it around," added Cruz. Teachers said it's really helped students who struggle to wrap their heads around the various algorithms that underpin high-level mathematics.
"How you take something that is still very abstract on paper and make it into a more concrete process is through real-life world scenarios. I can't take them to go fishing at school. But through the use of technology, we can leverage that and I can take them virtually fishing," added Monroy. The students are spilling out of the classroom and into the hall, talking with one another.
Those conversations are all about the work at hand, so they take material that's hard to grasp and make it digestible in a way students can master.
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