Since I didn’t post yesterday, here’s a little recap:

Yesterday the STEM XR team went to Meskwaki, an indigenous settlement about an hour from Ames to observe the digital literacy of second through fourth grade students, and to see how they received STEM topics. We taught them how to use Sphero Bots, and all the teams were very engaged throughout the entire time, despite being younger students. My group was super excited to try switching up the bot’s speed and time that it was running to see what would happen, and other groups made really cool obstacle courses for their bots. Overall, it was a very fun and productive day. (And we went and got smoothies after :))

Today has been fun so far as well. We started off by going into our deeper dive groups. I got the VR deep dive (yay!), and in our first meeting today we learned a little bit more about the definitions of VR, AR, MR, and XR, as well as the differences between external and internal types of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). We also started brainstorming a “why” for our topic decision for the deep dive. We chose to create a VR game to teach people how to be safe while hiking, i.e., what plants are edible, what to wear before hiking, what animals are safe, etc., but right now we’re trying to justify that this app is necessary or could actually be helpful.

Tomorrow we’re actually going hiking, so maybe we can take some inspiration from the hike tomorrow for our app.

That’s all I’ve got for today so far! Until next time 🙂