Coinciding with Teachers’ Day yesterday, the National Science Council (NSC) held a press conference to discuss future trends in learning through advanced technology such as virtual reality, enhanced reality and other interactive human-computer interfaces, all of which will be shown at the Science Season Technologies of the Future exhibition next month.
The exhibition’s “Future Education” section features innovations in e-learning that extend learning beyond the traditional classroom setting of students reading textbooks and listening to the teachers’ lectures.
National Taiwan University’s Science Education Center chief director Chang Chun-yen (張俊彥) and his team showed virtual reality field trips that allow users to get a real sense of being in a place and walking through different scenes.
While standing in a virtual classroom, users can interact with computer-programmed avatars, which ask questions about things learned during the field trip.
Enhanced reality learning methods using portable devices such as smartphones were also shown, allowing users to scan objects for additional information.
Hwang Gwo-jen (黃國禎), section convener and chair professor at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology’s Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, said that the team devised experiments to demonstrate that enhanced reality learning allowed students to develop a deeper impression of what they observed and learned.
Hwang said that while on traditional field trips a teacher could neglect the needs of a few students when teaching the whole class, enhanced reality allowed students to repeat and focus on the parts they are interested in or have trouble understanding.
Another team led by National Central University’s Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering professor Su Mu-chun (蘇木春) focused on students having fun while they learn and showed learning systems that were based on motion control.
Su said the “Singing-and--dancing Bear,” a teddy bear that can imitate the user’s movement from a sensor and link with real-time Internet-based communication software applications, could be used to accompany children when learning at home, especially given that families are much smaller than they used to be and there are now fewer children in each family on average.
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