Virtual Field Lab
Summary
We are gaining an increasing awareness that the future and its associated learning spaces and workplaces are not going to look or operate in the same ways that they have up to now. Community, distance, practice and learning must be conceptualized differently. All of these conditions point to an immediate need for compassionate and innovative ways of providing critical experiential learning opportunities to our students in the time of COVID-19 and in the future.
Project Team
Project Co-PIs:
Maria Palazzi, Director - ACCAD | Professor - Design
Dr. Lauren McInroy, Assistant Professor | College of Social Work
Concept Development:
Shadrick Addy, Design / ACCAD
Vita Berezina Blackburn, ACCAD
Yang Chen, Graduate Student, Design
Catherine Hechmer, College of Social Work
Katie Klakos, College of Social Work
Maya Jenkins, Graduate Student, Design
Lauren McInroy, College of Social Work
Maria Palazzi, Design / ACCAD
Jeremy Patterson, ACCAD
Interactivity:
Shadrick Addy, Design / ACCAD
Yang Chen, Graduate Student, Design
Sruthi Ammannagari, Graduate Student, Computer Science Engineering
Jeremy Patterson, ACCAD
Virtual Environments:
Shadrick Addy, Design / ACCAD
Mila Gajic, Graduate Student, Design
Maya Jenkins, Graduate Student, Design
Jeremy Patterson, ACCAD
Characters and Motion:
Vita Berezina Blackburn, ACCAD
Yang Chen, Graduate Student, Design
Maya Jenkins, Graduate Student, Design
Heran Zhou, Graduate Student, Design
Voice Actors:
Jake Athyall
Lillian Brown
Matt Derksen
Kylie Logan
Taylor Olsen
Partial funding for this project was provided by:
Covid-19 Grant | Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes, College of Arts and Sciences, The Ohio State University
Project Description
This project springs from the significant research and development that ACCAD has been doing in virtual reality to construct a Virtual Field Lab. The Virtual Field Lab, mirrors the real-life situations that students find themselves in during field experiences. The Virtual Field Lab will provide foundational curriculum content to first-year Master of Social Work (MSW I) students, providing realistic active learning opportunities for: (1) knowledge-building and perspective-taking; and (2) development and application of concrete social work practice skills. Our collaborative team from ACCAD, the Department of Design, and the College of Social Work, envisions a unique opportunity to enable new types of learning that respond to the need to reconcile physical distancing protocols with the experiential learning methodologies of social work-based field education through methodically-designed, immersive experiences that evoke perspective-taking and expand skill-building opportunities.
We anticipate that these VR modules will then be shareable with related majors and our system will be adaptable for application to other OSU disciplines who rely on experiential learning.
Examples of Work in Progress:
