{"id":26906,"date":"2026-01-30T17:07:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T22:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=26906"},"modified":"2026-02-05T10:48:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T15:48:42","slug":"students-set-sail-for-the-arctic-on-a-vr-excursion","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2026\/01\/30\/students-set-sail-for-the-arctic-on-a-vr-excursion\/","title":{"rendered":"Students set sail for the Arctic on a VR excursion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

On Dec. 7, middle school students from Central Massachusetts embarked on a research trip to the Arctic, all while never leaving the Clark campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The middle-schoolers were the guests of\u00a0Geography<\/a>\u00a0Professor Karen Frey<\/a>\u2019s Polar Science Research Laboratory<\/a> and her students in the First-Year Intensive seminar Communicating Climate Change: Emerging Strategies and Technologies. Frey\u2019s students demonstrated how virtual reality and immersive technologies can be used to \u201cvisit\u201d Arctic locations and learn how climate change is affecting sea ice and marine ecosystems.\u00a0Beyond the course, the students’ academic pathways were preparing them for a number of potential majors that included biology, interactive media, biochemistry and molecular biology, psychology, geography, environmental science, and business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thanks to the coaching they received from their Clark mentors, the VR goggle-clad middle school students had an opportunity to discover what it\u2019s like to cut through the water aboard a ship-based research excursion<\/a> and view a part of the world that gets very few (human) visitors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n