VR Field Trips for Educators
November 24, 2020
VR Expeditions 2.0 Screenshot
A leading educational robotics company, RobotLAB Inc., today announced the general availability of VR Expeditions 2.0 for classroom teachers. The app and content management system were created by company in partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica, following Google’s decision to make the Expeditions App accessible only from within Google Classroom on Nov. 12, 2020.
High-definition virtual field trips bring a new breath of life to an every-day lesson, especially nowadays, when everything around us looks so grim, Mr. Inbar emphasized.
RobotLAB has been the No. 1 partner for Google Expeditions for the past four years, as well as the only company authorized to ship Google Expeditions Kits globally. When Google decided to cease its VR efforts, discontinuing Google Daydream and the Expedition app, RobotLAB took advantage of this situation, partnering with Encyclopedia Brittanica, and introducing Virtual Reality Expeditions 2.0.
Teachers can select an expedition from hundreds of available expeditions on the newly-refreshed system, save their favorite expeditions locally, submit student hand-outs and curricular materials curated by Encyclopedia Britannica, and stream visuals directly to their classrooms. The unique design was designed for classroom management and provides educators time-saving resources, enabling more frequent virtual field trips.
VR Expeditions 2.0â„¢ is not a subscription service and does not require a yearly fee. Schools can optimize their budgets with a single-time license purchase without needing to purchase the content again in the following years. The teacher do not need the internet, since she leads the virtual field trip from her tablet.
In addition, based on lessons learned throughout the years, the content the instructors favor is saved locally on the instructor’s computer, so they are not dependent on future online service availability or access to the internet to run their lessons.
The company offers three pre-configured kits:
Standard Expeditions 2.0â„¢, AR/VR Expeditions 2.0â„¢, and Advanced Expeditions 2.0â„¢, allowing schools with different budgets to access the virtual field trips. Moreover, schools with existing hardware (student and teacher devices) can retrofit their existing kits (no matter where they got it from) to run VR Expeditions 2.0.
