Catawba College, a small, private liberal-arts school in North Carolina, is planning to bring VR technology from the California firm Dreamscape Learn into classrooms this fall. Carmony Hartwig, an associate professor of biology at Catawba, told EdScoop that her first time strapping on a headset to interact with Dreamscape’s virtual scenarios made her feel “giddy, almost in tears” as she imagined how such immersion might draw students into her beloved field of biology. “I feel like this is something that’s going to help my students to engage in a totally different way, with the material that they’ve probably been introduced to before, but it may not have been as exciting,” she said. “This technology is so immersive that it pulls you into the story and it makes it more like a storyline that you’re actively and emotionally involved in.”
