What the 3D Kids Say

The recent YouTube craze “What the Fox Says” is amusing to most, but carries a confusing message. Not so with “What the 3D kids say” in a two-year pilot project led by 4^th grade teacher-innovator, Holli Hillman.  In this week’s installment of the St. Francis school success story, we’re going to listen chiefly to the voices of the children involved in the project over the last two years. Face it—we can learn more from the sincere words of children, spoken in a few minutes, than we can learn from lengthy ramblings of marketing experts or educational experts.

What the 3D Kids Say

Cedar Creek Community School

I am going to bring you these quotes in a straight and unadulterated way—directly from the mouths of the 4^th grade children in this 3D project. I am only going to comment indirectly; the italics in each quotation below are mine. They represent my silent smile, pointing the reader to a key understanding or brain-based principle about “learning with depth.” By remaining silent, I feel I will provide greater voice to these nine-year-old students.  So, in that spirit, here is “what the 3D kids say” about learning with 3D:

"It's visual. You can see the actual water cycle and how it really is. A poster doesn't rain. Makes you feel like you are there and it helps you understand it better."

"The visual is good because we remember pictures and not words."

“We remember better and can visualize it [at] another time.”

"It makes it seem like you slow everything down and it makes it easier to learn it because you want to pay more attention to it and we're not just reading about it. You get to see more angles of things and more of the close up parts...like more details."

"It's more exciting to see things pop out because you feel like you're there and you learn more facts as someone tells you about what you're looking at. The screen moves and you actually feel like you're in the mountains."

"It's more exciting for us to learn in 3D because it shows you the system and how it works."

"When you show us a picture, you see the picture, and copy the picture because it doesn’t talk. But when you see the 3D, you don't copy it - you see it differently so you draw what you learned."

"You can picture it in your head better."

"We learn more in less time."

 “Ssshhh!” [whispered by children when adults are talking while students are viewing 3D content]”

Holli Hillman, the teacher extraordinaire leading this project adds: “My students are ready for more. They ask me daily if we get to view 3D. Although it's not something I use daily, as I continue to discover more content, my students and I will look forward to viewing concepts in 3D in other subject areas very soon!”

Well, there you have it. Consider going back to re-read each child's statement. Think about the brain-based research I highlighted with each italicized phrase. It make you wonder why 3D isn’t adopted more broadly, doesn’t it? 

Vision Health News

Here's some timely 3D vision health news from around the country:

Have you seen your optometrist lately?

VPI Research Conference Held. The Vision Performance Institute of Pacific University launched a major symposium focused on 3D vision health. Their 6th Annual Research Conference, was held in Oregon early June, and was entirely focused on providing current vision health information to researchers, medical folks, manufacturers, developers and practitioners alike. I spoke at this event and will share some interesting findings in a future post.

American Optometric Association. The AOA 2012 Optometry’s Meeting was held in Chicago at the end of June, offering four major sessions on 3D vision. The last session was a full day mini-conference called “The 3D Experience: Your Opportunity.” The AOA is getting serious about reaching their own ranks, as well as incoming optometry students, as they launch a two-year effort to spread the positive and important public health news. And the good news is: the seminars were packed with pre-registrations! That's very good news.

COVD 2012. Visual therapists (COVD) are also lining up to provide key educational sessions focused on 3D viewing and the use of 3D in treatment therapies at their annual conference, being held in August in Texas. 

If you are missing the context of previous posts on the topic of 3D and vision health, here are the basics: viewing 3D—in theaters, on home television sets, on game consoles, and in our nation’s classrooms—appears to serve as one of the most reliable and effective vision screeners ever offered. It's apparently far more effective than the standard eye-chart test. You see, 3D projected images can now be used as a universal public health screening tool for vision problems that previously went undetected. See this post for information from the American Optometric Association about the benefits of 3D vision.

A 3D Ladibug

Ground-breaking news in the educational 3D world. Lumens recently released their new 3D Ladibug document camera. This high-definition document camera comes 3D-ready for both 3D DLP projectors and 3D TVs. And don't worry, educators!  The 3D Ladibug easily can function as a 2D visualizer, as well! Lumens is a power player in the document camera industry, so this product release is not a trivial matter.

The context of this product release is not trivial within the education market either. A 3D document camera can be used by teachers to showcase immersive science experiments or model math skills through the visual display of manipulatives, tiny ‘blocks’ or shapes that teach place value, fractions, measurement, or geometry—with depth.  More importantly, the 3D document camera becomes another stout tool for content creation. Imagine student dioramas, stick or finger puppet shows, or model displays—again, with depth. And even primary children can ‘design’ the content. To learn more, take a look at this case study link and the following product data sheet link. You can also see live demonstrations on the exhibit hall floor at ISTE 2012 in San Diego in June. It’s a great time to be alive.

Spatial Thinking

Over the next few months, I periodically plan to interview some of the educational 3D content developers that are making great strides in producing classroom-ready content. This is the first posting in that editorial line.

This week, we see the release of a new series of secondary-level stereoscopic 3D  math simulations by Spatial Thinking, a Los Angeles-based educational content developer, with a top-rate programming team in Beirut, Lebanon.  Spatial Thinking produces interactive simulations designed to teach difficult math concepts to students using the advantages of 3D stereo visualization. And it works. 

The initial 3D stereo interactives released by Spatial Thinking, with more on the way.

This software was clearly designed with the math classroom in mind, tackling the toughest problems with bravado. George Dekermenjian, the founder of Spatial Thinking, explains: “Our goal was to create an application that would serve as a bridge between the teacher’s mind and the students’ minds.”

An interactive stereo 3D simulation that can be used by teachers or students to promote deep questioning and understanding of solids and their nets.

Focusing on the mathematics behind space geometry and measurement, the Spatial Thinking math series focuses on the relationships between concepts of geometry that students often feel are unrelated and disconnected. It deploys animations of more than 100+ objects to make learning connections successful for students. Dekermenjian is definitely on track when he clarifies that “any product aimed at teachers and students must be one that inspires discovery, experimentation, and engagement. “ These interactives do just that. No joke. For 3D-using educators, this software is definitely a must see, and portends a bright future for this company. Take a look.

Mental Reconstruction

As our phase 3 BVS³D research efforts came to a close, we took the opportunity to conduct wrap-up site visits. While conducting student and teacher one-on-one interviews and observing 3D lessons, some interesting discoveries materialized. One such finding, emerging from our teacher interviews, we labeled learning replay, which is described in the previous post. Another student behavior we observed may perhaps be best labeled as mental reconstruction.

The phenomenon of mental reconstruction occurred frequently within our 3D classrooms, affecting both students and teachers alike. Students would explain that, while taking a test several weeks following a 3D lesson, they could clearly ‘see’ or visualize the concept, construct or phenomena in their mind as they tackled a question. One student I spoke with, immediately following a 3D classroom lesson, described that 3D helped him “see things more clearly in my mind—like building a mental picture.” This sort of spatial or ‘visual’ thinking was even evidenced by teachers, who saw pictures in their mind as they were planning for upcoming lessons.

As teachers described this phenomenon, noting the apparent mind’s eye reconstruction that was taking place, we knew we were observing something else unique coming out of our 3D classroom experiment— mental reconstruction. As more schools and universities engage in continued studies of 3D learning, this may track into a potentially useful research question. It may be useful to track, observe, describe, and explain the concept of mental reconstruction in your own projects.