VR Experience Helps with First-Person Perspectives
An award-winning project utilises VR technology to help provide students with immersive experiences that aid them in their writing
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One of the winners of the Innovative CityU-Learning Awards Semester B, 2020-2021 was Tiffany PANG, who earned the prize for her work “VR in Everyday Language Classroom: A Practical Approach to Language Learning in a Digital Environment”. This project immersed English for humanities and social sciences students in a computer-generated world via Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. They then turned their experiences into a narrative before presenting this work to the class.
The Awards, introduced since the University’s implementation of CityU-Learning, aim to recognise innovative approaches implemented towards enhancing the quality of online and/or hybrid learning at CityU.
First-Person Problems
Pang is Instructor II at Chan Feng Men-ling Chan Shuk-Lin Language Centre (Language Centre) under CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Her VR headsets utilised pre-recorded videos, often sourced from YouTube, to help students experience first-person perspectives and how personal observations affect their writing.
Drawing an example from one exercise, Pang says, “I showed students a video of a haunted building. They watched the video through the VR headset, which gives the impression as if they were there in person. Afterwards, they wrote a story in first person based on their viewing.”
