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November 11, 2020
Our goal is to empower students to unleash their creativity while learning key 21st Century Skills, developing their computational thinking and problem solving skills.
As Unity’s mission outlines - The world is a better place with more creators in it - and we could not agree more. There is no better way to assess students understanding of a topic by asking them to create their own experiences and become master practitioners!
Introducing a professional-level game engine such as Unity to first-time students who might not have the confidence to code or learn a new software can be a complex task. It is with those students in mind that we built an extension to our Zoe app called Zoe for Unity, an approachable, no-code plugin allowing creative minds to build their own VR experiences in Unity.
With Zoe for Unity, students get the chance to learn some of the key coding logic skills in the background, build up confidence and create a product of their own that they can proudly share and showcase. It’s designed to be accessible to high-school students up to academic researchers who want to focus on the topic of their research rather than having to become a full stack software engineer.
The Zoe VR for Education course is divided into three different tutorials which range from the basics to building complex interactive VR experiences.
Tutorial 1: Getting Started with Zoe for Unity
This tutorial is designed to get your students started with Unity, VR, and Zoe. We recommend asking your students to go through each exercise one by one before moving to a more complex project.
At the end of this tutorial students will know:
- How to Install Unity and their VR headset;
- How to turn 3D models into interactive objects;
- How to animate 3D models based on user input;
- How to snap objects on top of each other;
- How to launch instructions or audio based on user inputs.
Tutorial 2: Building an Interactive Solar System
In this tutorial students will learn how to reproduce the Solar System, allow the user to navigate in between planets, trigger their revolutions and learn interesting facts about them.
At the end of the project, students will know about the planets of our solar system, how rotations and revolutions work, and experience in real-time the huge distances between planets. They will have learned how to use scaling to adapt different kinds of units and how to program behaviours based on conditions/events.
Students will be prepared for designing a VR experience, having learned a few tips around UX and how to guide users in VR.
Tutorial 3: Building a sustainable farming experience
In this tutorial, students will learn how to reproduce an ancient and sustainable planting system called the “Three Sisters”. They will need to research what is a system in nature, how plants can perform different tasks to help each other grow and how to best use nature's capabilities to produce our own food.
They will also learn how to use our Event based programming system and work on their problem solving and iteration skills.
We’re super excited to bring Zoe for Unity to the educator community. If you still haven't done it, sign-up for a free teacher account to give Zoe a try!
Unity Learn live session on December 1st, 2020
Join Emilie Joly in Unity Learn’s live session Teaching XR Development on Tuesday, December 1 at 5PM PT.
XR (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality) will have a major impact on society in the coming decades. Teaching 3D development skills with Unity will open up a world of possibilities for students across a range of industries and applications. Hear from experts in the field about the opportunities for students with XR and inspiring Unity educators who’ll share strategies and resources for supporting students learning XR development.