The immersive room has a custom, cubed design, with an open front. This shape allows for a blend of traditional and immersive teaching scenarios, with the open front also allowing the potential footfall of students at a given time to increase, yet still retaining a fully immersive experience for those inside.
This shared approach and design help the space retain collaborative, face-to-face learning, with lessons focusing on problem-solving, situation response, and immersive analysis.
Powering the space is Igloo Core Engine, our software system for creating, operating, and benefiting from immersive spaces. Igloo Core Engine is essential for this project, as the college makes extensive use of its built-in integrations with ThingLink, YouTube 360, Google Street View, and more.
“When students come and visit these immersive experiences, you get that wow factor.
"They're always curious and intrigued. The first thing they do is say, ‘What's this? This looks cool.’ They want to go in it. The first reaction is they want to step in, they want to experience it, they want to understand what it's about.”
Dan Walsh
Learning Support Technologist
The immersive cube has opened new learning opportunities for the students at Barnsley College that are otherwise not possible to recreate in a traditional classroom.
One such scenario focuses on Public Uniform Services, and having students take part in emergency response situations, including Road Traffic Collisions (RTC), house fires, and riots. By creating immersive environments, students are able to go far beyond the theoretical elements of learning, with the tension and chaos that come with these scenarios replicated, whilst remaining a totally safe environment to learn in.
With the space afforded, students are able to bring physical props to merge the realities of the physical and digital environment, further enhancing learning validity and engagement. Using the RTC scenario, students communicate from the scene via radio with other students outside the scene, with faltering communications and background noise replicating the difficulty of effective communication that they will experience in the real world.
When talking to students after they had lessons on major incidents in the space, they often used words like ‘stressful’, ‘chaotic’, and ‘confusing’, showing how emotional engagement and subsequent retention are heightened in the immersive environment.
Sports analysis is another area that is seeing a lot of use, breaking down 360 football content, giving much more intuitive depth and space perception to those inside, using the walls to draw key concepts overlaid on footage, and allowing for tactical and shape analysis that goes far beyond a traditional tactics board.
The overarching ethos of the space is to ‘bring learning to life’. Another example given was a lesson about the heart, where one teacher remarked that he wanted to take students right inside the organ and see how it worked in a natural and visual way. By using the space, the staff member was able to realise their vision and bring students on an interactive journey.
The multi-purpose nature of the system has also allowed for guest speakers to use it as a presentation tool, as well as host industry weeks and other events within it.
“We can put a video on in the classroom and then discuss it afterwards, but that doesn't put students at the centre of it, which I think is really important.
"Also, we can't really recreate road traffic collisions, and we definitely can't recreate house fires, so I think this is the perfect in-between to keep the students safe, but also to keep them in an incident. In my view, it does recreate the chaos or tension that someone might feel in that.”
Luke Davis
Lecturer, Public Services, Sport, Travel & Tourism
The college is seeing bookings increase as courses continue to integrate immersive lessons. Barnsley College is keen to expand on the take-up of the system and build up to its use in technical assessment.
At the time of writing, the college is using ThingLink for the majority of its lessons, creating immersive scenarios for a wide variety of lessons. It also uses YouTube 360 as a powerful, free-to-use immersive video bank and Google Street View to transport students to environments and places they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. However, growing the content bank for the space is a priority for the college by integrating wider software programmes and web-based content, with the goal of further enhancing the learning experience.
The space will form a core part of the learning experience at Barnsley College and open the doors for future students to enrol. It is in the early stages of being used to show prospective students what life is like at the college, with the goal of the space being to entice new students, make them excited about learning, and to give current students an experience that they will take home and tell their parents about.
“It's great to take them out of the classroom. It's something I hope they go away and talk about when they go home to their parents or carers. That’s what we've done at the college today. It's amazing.”
Luke Davis
Lecturer, Public Services, Sport, Travel & Tourism
“I come from a sporting background, where we did things like health and safety at football stadiums. Being able to walk through and be able to pick things out instead of just sitting at a table and talking about it would have been awesome.
That opportunity is here now. That was just one example, but there's a whole load of different experiences that you can have right now here at college.”
Dan Walsh
Learning Support Technologist
“The engagement's been awesome so far. We're seeing things like block bookings, staff are booking it up every week. So yeah, it's becoming a big part of how we do things here at college.”
Dan Walsh
Learning Support Technologist
