Today’s guest, Craig Frehlich, is an educational consultant, and first saw the learning potential of VR on a trip to the mall with his son. But he drops in to stress the experience itself isn’t going to teach much, without a discussion with students about what they experienced after the fact.

Julie: Hello, my name is JulieSmithson and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. I look forwardto bring you insight into changing the way we learn and teach usingXR technologies, to explore and enhance an individualized learningfor everyone. Today, my guest is Craig Frehlich. And he has beenworking in education for over 25 years and has his master's degree ineducation with a focus on curriculum design. He is also aneducational consultant and speaker on the topics of inquiry, designthinking, and the use of technology in education. Craig is currentlya design teacher and academic advisor for various organizations, andhe pioneered the first VR lab for school in Canada. His main focus isto use contextual and conceptual thinking to translate VR experiencesinto lesson guides that help map successfully introspective journeysin virtual reality. His upcoming book, "Immersive Learning:Harnessing Virtual Reality Superpowers in Education", offers apractical approach to using VR in a variety of subjects anddisciplines. Thanks for joining me today, Craig.

Craig: Hi, Julie. Thanks forhaving me. I'm excited to be on the show.

Julie: And what perfect timingthis is to talk about some of the schools that you work on, to helpsupport our educators in the global community today.

Craig: I agree.

Julie: Yeah. So maybe if youwant to share a little bit about what you're working on, and how youcan help our listeners -- especially if they're teachers -- in someof the work that you've done, and provide some advice on learning forthose listeners today.

Craig: I'd love to. I think I'llstart with my origin story, which is how I first got interested inVR. So my son and I were in a mall in Canada and it was 2016. He was16 at the time, 16 years old. So he dragged me into a Microsoft storewhere they had an HTC Vive setup. We had to sign a whole bunch offorms. Luckily, there was no line up and he donned the headset andwas playing around in VR. It was The Lab by Valve. And I watched him,and he was enthralled and it looked so interesting. So he convincedme to put the headset on. When I put the headset on, I just couldn'tbelieve how realistic it was. There's words like presence and whenyou're don your avatar, how it feels so much like real life. And itwas that moment that got me thinking about how a great tool thiswould be for VR.

Julie: So how did you then takethat next step in to, I guess, becoming an educator within VR? Wheredid that take off for you?

Craig: On our drive home back toour town, we started ruminating on the experience. Like, The Lab hasLongbow, which is an archery game. And my son and I started talkingabout how you could feel the controllers vibrate, and we started tounpack the experience. Which made me think about, it's one thing forpeople to put the headset on, but I think most importantly --especially for educators -- is how can we make meaning from such amagical/powerful experience? So I started investigating this. Luckyenough, we ended up getting someone donate some money, and we boughtthree headsets for our school in Canada. And as we put headsets onkids, they walk away with awe, wonder, sometimes bewilderment. But itwas until we had conversations after, that it really solidified thelearning. So I started writing lesson guides, things like "Whatshould you be seeing? What should you be focusing on before you getinto the headset?" And then probably more importantly, when theexperience was over, having rich deep conversations on, "Okay,what just happened?"

Julie: I think that's reallyimportant, that you don't just stick somebody into an experience,have them go through that, and then take the headset off and justwalk away. The most important part -- I think -- is the decompressingof what that experience was about.

Craig: In my other observationswith students -- which led me down this path that I'm on now -- wasnot all experiences were created equal. And what I mean by that is,it seemed to be the ones that were more contextual and conceptualthat kids wanted to talk more about, and they had more to thinkabout, and they had more to discuss. So, for example, one experiencethat I love is called Fantastic Contraption. It's a VR applicationoriginally as a game, but students have to basically take all theselittle wheels and sticks. It's like a puzzle, they have to build thiscontraption that moves this little jelly ball down a pathway to ajelly wall. And when kids are problem solving like this, they'regonna make errors, they're gonna make mistakes, and some give up. Andthey need to talk about that. They need to pause. They need to think.And this way of thinking, this deeper sort of schemata that they'reforming in their minds was what I found VR to be most beneficial. Andthe reason my anecdotal observations about this were, they wanted totalk more about stuff like this, then maybe VR applications, whichalbeit are powerful at heightening visualization, they had less tothink about. So there's a chemistry one called Nanon, and in Nanonyou can build organic molecules. So we used that in my old schoolquite a bit, and it scratched the surface on understanding somethingthat you probably couldn't understand from a textbook. But kidsdidn't have as much to ruminate and chew on and think about, asopposed to experiences that were way more conceptual, or forced ormade them struggle to think about connecting smaller ideas or factsto bigger ideas, like systems thinking which I talked about.Fantastic Contraption forces kids to be really good systems thinkers.

Julie: That I think is reallyimportant right now is you're identifying critical thinking andproblem solving, which are some of the biggest soft skills tools thatwe need today. And moving into these virtual worlds, these are theskill sets that are so important for not just for the next generationstudents and kids, but for all of us to start to engage. Andobviously, you've discovered some of these applications that offerthis type of thinking. And I think this is where we'll start to seethat differentiation in the educational applications that separateout those ones that actually stimulate and engage the students, andmake them think and problem solve.

Craig: If we have the time --which I have -- I did a bunch of consulting work for Springboard VRand they hired me to look at existing off-the-shelf edugames that areon the market, to think about the best case scenario for education.And so I spent a good two years writing lesson guides and thinkingabout what's already existing from gaming companies, that might behighly educational and very conceptual. And so I've curated a numberof these lesson guides in my upcoming book, and -- like I said -- itallows students to more than just scratch the surface. I think theInternet and textbooks can help kids give foundational knowledge. Butthis experiential knowledge, this is what I believe -- in my humbleopinion -- VR was made for. Headsets are still relatively expensive,so we want to be able to put them on students and have them be wowedand awed by deeper thinking. Here's a good example, there's a VR gameout there called... Cave Digger, thank you. And in Cave Digger, thegame basically is, you're a miner. And so you hop on to the headset.It takes you down below in a mine. You have different tools likepickaxes and you have to go down. It's a visceral experience, you godown this elevator and it stops at certain floor. And you can lookaround and you can feel what it's like to be a miner. And then youhave to start hammering away at the different types of rocks, and notall the rocks in the mine are the same. Some are softer and harder.So you have to swing and you collect different minerals. You comeback into this mining town, you can wander around the mining town,you get a sense for what the people are like. And so this particulargame is something that social studies teachers or geography teacherswould love to have, because you can't teach that in the textbook. Oneof my favorite experiences as a kid was going to the amusement parkin my physics class, because we got experiential learning to see howroller coasters work. We had to take measurements and calculations,but we were right there living the life of what someone who doeshigher level physics might do.

Julie: I want to take a quickstep back, and something mentioned was about the gamification portion-- and I don't know if you actually use that term -- but wheneverybody was in school, teachers were competing with video games.Students would prefer to be on their video games rather than being inclasses. And one of the things that I've been working on for a whilenow is trying to explain to people how gamification needs to be apart of that education curriculum to test and fail the students whohave the knowledge -- passive knowledge -- to challenge the students,and gamify things. And I always said the gamers are going to saveeducation, because that's how students are engaged, is by challengingthemselves and by discovery. And if we can start to implement -- asteachers -- more gamification into the lessons, it builds thatchallenge and it also provides rewards, even as simple as a goldstar. I always talked about this as well was why are we onlyrewarding kids once a year for them to pass their grade in school,when we could reward them more frequently based on the increase oftheir knowledge base? So it then ties back into gamification and howthere's so many different ways that we can challenge students thesedays, especially in virtual gaming and really education platforms,that we need to embed this in order to attract the actual experienceto the student and also to test their knowledge.

Craig: I couldn't agree more. Ijust-- yesterday I was talking to the CEO of Resolution Games.Resolution Games is an amazing gaming company, in my opinion, becausethey have all these non-violent games which -- more importantly --are multiplayer. So one favorite one that many schools are startingto use is called Acron. So in Acron there's one person who's got theheadset on, but everyone else -- nine other people -- can play alongon their phones. Now you've got nine students involved. So in thegame, the ultimate goal is the giant tree has the headset on, and thetree has to protect its acorns. Everybody else on their phone arelittle squirrels that have to try and take the acorns from the gianttree. It's so powerful when you watch students for team building andcollaboration, because all the squirrels who are on the phone, whenthey first play it, they take this individual role and they go it ontheir own. But pretty soon they start to realize that if they team upwith other squirrels to come up with a strategy, then they're muchmore successful in the game and they start talking to each other,strategizing and collaborating and communicating. And I believe --again -- that this is the power of VR.

Julie: Absolutely. I couldn'tagree more. And I think VR and AR have opened up all of thesedifferent possibilities of collaboration, which if you take a look atthe older school systems -- I shouldn't say older, I should say oldschool systems -- that opportunity to collaborate in a gamified waymight have been done with a couple of pieces of paper, and maybe somedice, and maybe a problem that the teacher provided. But now theimmersiveness and the interactivity and the sharing of concepts, andthat sort of thing, it creates a brand new collaboration and learningenvironment that's never been provided before.

Craig: Even VR narratives arebecoming great conceptual based teaching and learning tools. Forexample, when you watch a regular biography or story on a computer,you have very little agency. You have the perspective or point ofview from whoever the director is. However, in many VR applications-- that are done really well -- when you're don a headset, your pointof view and perspective can be varied depending on where you look, orpossibly how the VR story is played out by the producer or thedirector. And the discussions unfold or unpack like Pandora's Box,because now it depends on where you're looking and what situation orperspectives. Big ideas like identity, which is a powerful conceptualidea in many curricula for language arts. The discussion isn't "OK,what was the point of view of the author on this one?" It was,"What was your point of view?" Or if you looked at thestory with the VR headset under this sort of path or agency, how isthat different than if you looked at it this way?

Julie: This leads to everybody'sindividual learning lesson plan and building out those individualexperiences based on where you're looking, and following thebranching narratives based on what you select and how you play orinteract. And it's only just the beginning, which we can talk fordays and days about the different potential and opportunities, butI'd like to narrow down with you. If you were to give advice toteachers today and let's say teachers and parents, because we'rerecognizing a lot of families who are now staying home due to thecoronavirus, and a lot of families have had to start looking fordifferent ways to engage their children during the days. And theirschool systems aren't providing enough content to keep them busy.What would you advise to them to get started and understanding moreabout this new virtual world of learning?

Craig: First and foremost,because everyone I think that I've talked to in this genre ofcommunication is that it wasn't until they actually put on a headsetthat they understood the magic. And so that's number one. Teachersout there, you have to try it. You could find either through maybe arental or some avenue. Try it, put on a headset, try out some ofthese interactive, highly engaging applications like FantasticContraption. Once teachers have the headset on and realize the senseof presence that you have, the realism that goes on inside theheadset, that they'll be convinced that it isn't just a fad or someshiny new technology toy that will gather dust in the long run. Sothat's number one: try to put on a headset. Number two, just likeanything, reflection is key and paramount. Putting kids inside theexperience, the student might be internally motivated to sort out intheir mind what went on. But I think it's our responsibility to talkto the student after or the class. And well-crafted lesson plans canreally map out that experience. And by map, I don't mean like aGoogle map. If we type in Google Maps, it's going to give us kind ofa straight linear or shortest route to our finish line. The map for aVR experience is going to be more like a treasure map, wheredepending -- as you talked about -- the student, the individual mighthave a different pathway toward what was meant to happen within VR.Having these conversations, these reflection sessions is super key.Thirdly, the third thing that I would suggest to teachers is to startto get familiar with kid culture. Games, as you said, games are partof kid culture. And the more we're familiar with that genre and whyit's such a powerful medium where kids are allowed to fail and tryagain, push the reset button. The more we're familiar with it, themore we can lean them towards non-violent educational games whichbecome important and conceptual for learning.

Julie: I think you couldn't havesaid it better. Thanks, Craig. One thing I wanted to close off with.Why don't you tell everybody about your book and how we're gonna beable to find it? Because I think it's something I want to read, and Ithink everybody in the education sector should start to readsomething like this.

Craig: Oh, thank you. Yeah, mybook is set to come out August 1st. As you alluded to at the start ofthe podcast, it's very much a practical guide. It walks teachersthrough some vignettes and some stories around why VR is an importanttool to make its way into schools and homes, from a learningperspective. I curated over 60 lesson guides and highlighted andrecommended over 60 VR applications that I think would offer powerfulconceptual understanding for students, parents and, of course,teachers.

Julie: I look forward to seeingwhen it comes out and share with us. Before just trying to wrap upthis podcast, can you tell everybody where they can reach you, ifthey have any other questions?

Craig: Twitter would be the bestmedium or venue. So I'm on Twitter @Cfrehlichteach. Other avenues,I'm on LinkedIn as well. I offer a podcast about VR in education. Sothat's through the various iTunes, etc.. So again, my VR podcast iscalled "VR in Education", if they're interested in learningmore about how it intersects with education.

Julie: That's great. Absolutely.And I think these conversations are also really important to addressfrom so many different perspectives and avenues. We're all trying tolearn this new medium together. And I'd like to put this moment tosay thank you, Craig, for joining me on the XR for Learning podcast.And please come back again. And let's talk about your book once it'slaunched. And we can share the news with the listeners again.

Craig: I would love that, Julie.And I want to add that thank you for being such a good conduit for usin this industry, which is growing like crazy. Without people likeyou, I think us smaller educators, who dabble in this as just ahobby, wouldn't have a good direction.

Julie: Thanks so much, itdefinitely takes the collaboration of many to put out any kind ofeducation these days. Things are changing so quickly within ourworld. And again, thank you, Craig, for being with us. My name isJulie Smithson and this is the XR for Learning podcast. Thanks,everyone.