About Peck
Distance Learning at Peck
It’s a Jungle Out There: Adapting a Virtual Reality Project
“What makes a civilization?” This is the essential question that guides the fifth grade all year long. This spring, Peck students have discovered that getting to the answer—whether they're on campus or not—requires hefty doses of creativity, physical computing, and hard work.
The civilizations project takes slightly different forms each year, depending on the tools, resources, and fresh ideas of the fifth-grade teaching team. The original plan for Technology & Design class this year? Build a civilization, real or imagined, in a small group of two to three classmates, using the tool CoSpaces, which enables students to create and code their own virtual reality or augmented reality worlds. Peck students had just gotten an introduction to CoSpaces the week before March Break—and then the world changed.
With the school quickly moving to distance learning in response to COVID-19-related restrictions, fifth-grade teacher and Director of the Osborn Idea and Design Lab Bruce Schwartz had to rethink the civilizations project. Suddenly, hands-on collaboration was too onerous for students unable to physically interact. To scale down the project for a solo student working largely in a self-guided capacity, Schwartz shrunk the assignment from a world, a planet, or an empire down to a single location—a zoo.
“A zoo is certainly a civilization of sorts,” Schwartz remarked. Instead of having the whole universe at the creative fingertips of a group of students and imaging a world on Mars, or underwater, or in ancient Rome, the modified project has one student focus on a smaller space, while honing the same technical and creative skills, and developing some new ones as well.
The students have built their individual zoos in different VR environments—the arctic, a jungle, a cityscape, a safari—and the animal avatars inside them have ranged from traditional elephants and zebras to fantastical dragons and unicorns. Animals will be programmed to walk, talk, and interact. There are endless options for individuality and choice along with learning important skills, not least of which is, indeed, how to learn.
“It’s one thing to learn a skill when somebody is standing up in front of you and telling you how to do it,” Schwartz said. “It's another to be given materials and then having to find for yourself how to do it—and in today’s world, that’s a really important lesson.” With Technology & Design class being offered asynchronously (with no live classes), students are interpreting, researching, and tinkering with the tools provided to get comfortable with the CoSpaces program and complete the assignment. Fifth graders are facing challenges that some students don’t encounter until college, but Schwartz knows they’re up to the task. “Believe me, I’ve seen what they’re capable of!”
VR tools like CoSpaces help students develop computing, coding, and critical thinking skills, but the distance learning twist this year has added a whole new layer of perseverance to this already-complex assignment. Rather than having teammates to lean on, students are developing resilience and learning how to ask for help (with teachers available for one-on-one Zoom meetings to assist with sticky issues), an important lesson in itself.
Fifth-grader Dean Zarro noted that it’s different working solo than in the partner situation he was expecting, but that it’s been a rewarding experience nonetheless. “I have been enjoying the designing process and just being creative and playing around with it the most,” Zarro shared.
Not unlike distance learning itself, the modified civilizations project is, in the end, what a student makes of it. “They need to complete certain requirements, but after that, it’s up to them,” said Schwartz. “They have a whole blank canvas to create the world that they want to create.”
THE PECK SCHOOL
247 South Street | Morristown, NJ 07960973-539-8660
Northern New Jersey's timeless and transformative co-ed independent elementary and middle school education for grades K-8.
The Peck School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.