VR and AI in Education: The Future of Learning | Kristen Tamm | TEDxTartuED

Transcriber: Farah Arabiyat Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard Hello. Please raise your hand if you know what this thing is. Very good.

Almost two thirds of the audience. Now, please raise your hand if you know what Chat GPT is. Almost all of you.

It’s an AI powered chat bot. Today, I will tell you how these two will revolutionize education. Imagine yourself being in school, learning about planets and universe.

What if instead of just looking at the textbook, you could go on a journey? You could walk on Mars, visit space stations and feel what it's like to drink coffee in a zero gravity environment. Your curiosity will get an outlet of an adventure.

With you, there is a tutor who has nerves of steel, ready to explain everything to you from a million different angles if needed. I wish I had such experiences when I was in school, but technology wasn't there back in the day. My point today is not to tell you how fast the technology is advancing.

This is something you already know. My point today is that in the near future, we’ll see how VR and AI will transform how we learn. Such discovery-learning experiences will be widely adopted and available in schools.

My name is Kristen, and for the past four years, I’ve been developing educational VR experiences for physics and chemistry lessons. But VR and AI… most of you here are educators or students. So you might think that, more virtual worlds?

Artificial intelligence? Scary! But don’t worry, I’ll get you excited about the future.

But first, apart from all things that these technologies can do, what are the problems that they help us to solve? Last year, I visited a school in Estonia and met with Reiner, an educational technologist, who declared that starting from next week, he will be also giving geography lessons. Because their school's geography teacher said that it's enough for her.

The flowers and chocolate bars the principal sent to her over every summer did not work anymore. She wanted to retire. Finally.

It was Reiner’s time to step up. According to Eurostat, more than 39% of teachers in Europe are more than 50 years of age. And one Unesco report says that we need millions of new teachers by 2030.

While these numbers are really huge and hard to grasp, think of it as you’re a principal of a school, and a few weeks before the start of the school year, you still have 5 or 10 teacher positions unfilled. Aging teacher population is just one side of the problem. There is also low salaries and high workload, so it's really hard to retain teachers.

But as parents, we want teacher per student ratio to increase, not decline. We want education to be better than in the past. There's also another problem.

For generations, our education methods have largely stayed the same. Students sit in classrooms, listen to lectures, memorize facts. Often without any meaningful connection to real world applications.

Many students find this boring and uninspiring. For some, it’s a struggle just to stay awake in the class. There’s a lot of research done that shows how poor engagement leads to poor academic results.

So who will teach the future generations and how? The urgency here is not just to recruit more teachers, but to use more tech solutions around us to address the teacher shortage. And make education better, effective and more engaging.

In 2018, we had set up a successful virtual reality arcade company. Over our first operational year alone, we had more than 10,000 hours of playtime by teenage children mostly. While there were many wonderful games, there was one called Job Simulator.

The idea is you pick a job and do it in VR. So here, for example, you’re either an office worker or a car mechanic. The first thing we saw players do, children, was they poured coffee into the printer or energy drink under the hood of the car just to see what happens.

Just to discover and experiment. That was the moment when we thought: what if they do something in VR that’s useful, that helps them to learn better? So we decided to build a few prototypes of VR experiences where players have to put out fire and see what happens.

For example, what happens if you try to put out the fire on an oily pan using a glass of water for it? Who doesn’t know? Please don’t try this at home.

Fast forward a few years and we have a team of science teachers, developers and game designers, and we have developed a library of VR learning experiences for physics and chemistry topics. Students can do experiments that would be too dangerous to carry out in real life. And learn about abstract concepts, things that are too big or too small to see with human eye.

While they’re interacting with objects in this VR environment, with hands on, they’re 100% focused and in charge of their own learning pace. They can feel the 3D immersive environment through their senses, just like in real, real life. They will solve puzzles and learn about chemistry and physics through trial and error.

Because learning is about making mistakes. You first have to know what you don’t know to turn on your brain and take information in like a sponge. There's a lot of research done that shows the advantages of using VR in education.

Students are more motivated, they are more confident, and tests also show that they learn better. But what I would like to emphasize is not merely the fact, not merely the benefits of VR in education, but the fact that we’re able to scale experiences that were thought to be tied with physical location. So, examples: lab experiment or field trips or skill training, for example.

If we think about video learning materials, then we think of them as easily accessible and scalable resources for learners across the globe. They can be watched by millions of students simultaneously, regardless of their location. Now think of think about educational VR experiences the same way.

A really well-designed VR lab available to thousands of school, millions of students at the same time. What a high value brought to a big number of people. Now, let's take this a step further.

As I saw, most of you know what Chat GPT is, but who doesn’t? It’s an artificial, intelligent counterpart with whom you can have a meaningful conversation. You can let it summarize long texts or… write perfect email replies for you.

Or you can ask it to help you with your schoolwork. Here, for example, I asked Chat GPT to help me with the eighth grad physics exercise from Physics workbook. And it’s about calculating the distance between two cars based on the information where they were at a specific time moment.

It takes around 30s for Chat GPT to lay down the answer, which is correct, by the way. So it’s smart and it’s fast. We have also experimented with ChatGPT in photo class.

The idea is whenever you’re in trouble in VR, you can ask for help from this Chat GPT chat bot. Although it is very promising and already a powerful tool, I feel we're fundamentally halfway there. The real transformation in education happens when those AI powered helpers will start asking questions.

How can I help you? What do you think you need to do? What molecule you need to put on the table there.

They will guide your attention in this virtual environment and give you information bits by bits and pieces so that you would arrive to a perfect result. Imagine how empowered Reiner and other teachers around the globe would be if they had such a tech tools at their disposal. Maybe we're not in such a deep teacher shortage crisis and maybe we’re able to help those students who didn’t get enough in school and help them reach their dreams.

VR headsets are far more than just gaming gadgets for Christmas presents. They're affordable and they're available. Intelligent tutoring systems are being integrated into tech solutions around the world as we speak.

Now is the time to embrace these new technologies and work together to reshape the future of education. I would like to end on a personal note: this is my daughter, Harriette. She’s two.

While there isn’t much happening in this picture, this marks the day when she learned what the plane flight is and how the Earth looks like from above. I would like to think about her future education full of immersive virtual world discoveries as well as treasured real life moments we spent together. Thank you.