Professor Caroline Robertson Awarded DCAL Grant to Enhance Student Learning Through VR Headsets

The students of Dr. Caroline Robertson's 21W Cognitive Neuroscience class can better understand course concepts by directly experiencing some of the psychological phenomena that they are learning about. Assistant Professor Robertson was awarded a grant from the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, in collaboration with John Bell at the Dev Studio, to develop VR experiments and experiences for the class. The grant allowed for an Oculus 2 VR headset to be purchased for each of the students in the class. The headsets were prepared for classroom use by Dr. Robertson, with help from Tommy Botch and AJ Haskins, and then mailed out to the students' homes.
Each week, Dr. Robertson sends her students remote experiments based on topics being covered in class. Some examples include seeing the world through the eyes of a developing infant or a navigation experiment on the Dartmouth campus. Read about how Dr. Robertson was able to bring her idea to fruition in this DEV studio article and find out more about how students are benefitting from the program in this article published in The Dartmouth.