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October 25, 2020
#2030: Swiss & US Classrooms Leveraging VR To Create Their Own Vision Of The Future
LAUSANNE (October 21st, 2020) – In a time where digital technologies are becoming a key part of education systems globally, the need to empower students to become creators and develop key 21st Century skills such as collaboration, creativity, and computational thinking is more important than ever.
Designed in partnership with Swiss-US startup apelab, CompiSternli, and San Diego based educator Kwaku Aning, the learning program will bring a groundbreaking virtual reality learning to secondary schools in Switzerland and the United States.
Funded by the Gebert Rüf Foundation through their Digital Education Pioneer program and supported by DartLabs, the project will allow swiss students in 7-9th grade to develop their own vision of what the future of can look like using apelab’s immersive learning platform Zoe. The project starts with a technical training program for teachers delivered by Apelab co-founder Maria Beltran, followed by a talk from Kwaku Aning, Director of the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking at SDJA speaking about his own experience using Virtual Reality with High School Students.
Zoe allows students to build their own Virtual Reality interactive experiences and stories from scratch.
The following swiss schools are the first to kick-off the program in November 2020: the Obersee Bilingual School, Oberstufe Wasseramt Ost, Schule Meiringen, Schulen Hünenberg, Schulen Steinhausen, and Volksschulgemeinde Wigoltingen. Each will be focusing on imagining the school of the future. The program will be supervised by Rahel Tschopp, who has been working in bringing digital literacy in swiss schools for many years:
"Young students are best placed to tell us what education should look like! Thanks to this program, they will be able to present their ideas of what the future of school can be. This project has a tremendous amount of potential to finally give students a voice while learning how to use new techniques to construct their own vision of the future."
Rahel Tschopp, Founder @CompiSternli
The program will start with a training program lead by Maria Beltran, apelab co-founder using the latest Oculus Quest 2 headsets.
Within the next school year, teachers and students will have the opportunity to exchange on their vision for the future of education, climate change and work to solve real world problems and share their own perspective.
In the world we live in it's more important than ever to give a voice to younger generations. We will learn a lot from their personal vision across different cultures. Using immersive technologies will allow them to truly bring this into their own worlds and stories. We are already looking to extend the project to more countries and looking forward to seeing what the students come up with!
Emilie Joly, Co-Founder @apelab
All the virtual reality experiences created by the students will be showcased during an international showcase in the second part of 2021. There is still the opportunity for new schools to join the adventure. If you are part of a secondary school and interested to join the 2030 project, you can apply here: