Jesse Schell

This project team will fully develop and test History Maker VR, a virtual reality (VR) content-creation tool for middle school students to create, record, and share unique performances to increase understanding and relevance of historical events. History education encourages students to learn about the past and to develop critical thinking skills to negotiate the present world with appreciation for multiple perspectives. In the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 18% and 2...

This project team will fully develop and test HoloLAB Champions, a virtual environment integrated within a Virtual Reality (VR) headset for an immersive exploration of a chemistry lab. While chemistry labs offer the benefits of hands-on experimentation to help students learn abstract concepts, they are costly to maintain, supervise, and pose safety risks. Virtual chemistry labs for computers and tablets allow students to explore chemistry safely with unlimited resources, and provide immedia...

This project team developed and tested Happy Atoms, a physical modeling set and an interactive iPad app for use in high school chemistry classrooms. Happy Atoms is designed to facilitate student learning of atomic modeling, a difficult topic for chemistry high school students to master. Standard instructional practice in this area typically includes teachers using slides, static ball and stick models, or computer-simulation software to present diagrams on a whiteboard. However, these methods...

In this project, the team developed a prototype of Happy Atoms, a game to support middle school students in learning about the composition of molecules. Happy Atoms includes physical manipulative balls with embedded magnets wirelessly connected to a tablet application (app) to recognize whether or not the created molecule exists and explain why or why not. The app also includes teacher resources including instructional videos and curriculum suggestions in order to better integrate the use of...