How New Technology Can Make a Big Difference in Education
For this project I chose my space to be about the lifecycles of butterflies. The space features multiple diagrams of the lifecycle and facts about butterflies. It also includes an artist who did realistic illustrations of bugs often depicting life cycles as well. All of these things in my space are very good for students with sight. This is what pushed me to think deeper and pick something that could be 3-D for a student who may have visual impairments.
In the realm of education technology is evolving rapidly and affecting our students. From having laptops or tablets to now having AI software and virtual realities. In a science in the elementary schools course my professor had built a very important project where we were to build a science lesson in virtual reality. This is because students are able to connect with technologies since they are the ones using it most often. Along with this technology is a big tool that we are able to use to help our students learn.
One downfall to this virtual reality space is it’s not all inclusive. The semester before my class my professor had a student who was visually impaired. This presented the challenge of excluding the student because they could not participate in a visual space.
This is when she proposed being able to use another technology to help the student such as 3-D printing. To help her with her research and planning, another classmate and I decided to test out printing an aspect of our space that can be touched by those with visual impairments.
The three most important platforms that I used and learned were Spatial.io, Shaper 3-D and SketchFab. All of these platforms are very new to me so it took a lot of learning to be able to tackle them. I also needed a lot of patience to try and put things in my space and also then try to transfer a 3-D object to be built for printing. All of it was very out of my comfort zone but getting too experienced different software’s makes me more confident in being able to tackle new things in the future
For my artifact I chose to show my final 3-D printed object from my VR space. There are many steps that I had to take to obtain a 3-D printed object. Firstly I needed to figure out what object I felt was most important, it was supposed to represent the anchor of my space. After that the most challenging part comes where I have to configure the piece to be able to print.
Originally it seemed to be easy because we were able to take from sketch fab and send that to the printer. Unfortunately that was not the case and we had to do a lot of transposing with the file from different platforms so that we could communicate with the computer. Another complication that we fell into was the butterfly on the sketch Fab file did not want to print because of the thin antennas. This made us delete the butterfly in 3-D print a separate one to be glued onto the final product.
 |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
In conclusion this project was really important for me as an educator not just because it gave me an experience but it also opened my perspective. It made me explore how I can get my students interacting with their learning by being on devices and how that affects students that have different abilities. It was a challenging process because I was learning something new but I will always be learning how to adapt and learn something quickly in my classroom. I know that in the future I will be thinking about ways I can connect students to my lessons if they can immediately connect because of things out of their control.