On Dec. 7, middle school students from Central Massachusetts embarked on a research trip to the Arctic, all while never leaving the Clark campus.
The middle-schoolers were the guests of Geography Professor Karen Frey’s Polar Science Research Laboratory and her students in the seminar Communicating Climate Change: Emerging Strategies. Frey’s students demonstrated how virtual reality and immersive technologies can be used to “visit” Arctic locations and learn how climate change is affecting sea ice and marine ecosystems.
Thanks to the coaching they received from their Clark mentors, the VR goggle-clad middle school students had an opportunity to discover what it’s like to cut through the water aboard a ship-based research excursion and view a part of the world that gets very few (human) visitors.
To recreate the excursion, Frey’s students incorporated 360-degree film footage that the professor has collected on her Arctic research cruises with AI technologies and other climate change learning resources to shape a virtual reality curriculum. The teaching event, held in the Center for Media Arts, Computing, and Design, gave them a pathway to see how their VR product from the course might live on outside the walls of the University.
