 Hello, this is Jackie Lee from ScienceVR. Today we're going to talk about immersive science labs and gain development for young learners. Me, my family, is Ed. He's going to appear very soon. So, I want to give you a brief overview of what I've been doing and what leads me here. Ed, actually, he's the guy that leads us here. He's currently 11 years old, a sixth grader. He got his promotion from fifth grade to sixth grade just this year. So, he's been in the new campus without getting in touch with any of his new classmates. He's also a real engine developer. We've been working together since the school closure. So, you're going to see him in some of our video clips. I'm Jackie Lee. I got my PhD from MIT Media Lab, focusing on understanding human emotions using technologies. And then I worked at Intel RealSense, where we developed 3D cameras and later on AR and VR. After Intel, I founded ScienceVR. The goal is to think about this new medium that we can design and put our design in front of others' eyes. So, this is a very powerful tool that I think will bring a significant change to our future of education. So, I'm very fortunate. I got grants, fundings from MIT's same box innovation fund program and supports from Oculus Start. And we also receive Epic Mega Grants. We're going to talk about immersive science labs. Why doing this? I think if we can be closer to historical stories, it will be easier for us to learn and discover more stuff. That's kind of a general idea. Here we have a few images on the slides and we're going to take a short tour to some of it. However, the idea is that if we can be closer to historical stories, then this will be very fun to just take a few steps away from those famous thinkers. For example, physicists, writers, sci-fi characters. And those writers and thinkers, they have great ideas. And what if we can be part of their ideas and tinker around what they were working on? I think that will be very, very fun for learners from all ages, especially younger age. We started ScienceVR by looking at how we can build science labs inside this immersive environment. We took an approach about we want to combine historical stories and also interactive visualizations and to use those interactivities to get our learners to tinker and to build on their own knowledge. This is also a very powerful way of using immersive media because our users can use their hands. From physics, we started to build Michael Faraday's laboratories where he did a series of electromagnetic experiments. And we reviewed Ada Lovelace and Charles Barber just along where they invented the first machine that can calculate polynomials. We also reviewed Mercury and P.A. Mercury, their journey of discovering radian and polonium. So let's dive in more, Michael Faraday. He invented a series of electromagnetic apparatuses that hugely influenced our modern life. And one of the discoveries he made was the idea of the field. So what you are seeing here is the field lines around the magnet. So he was the first to conceptualize those invisible force lines. And we find that it's quite match to our approach because using VR we can see the unseen, like those invisible force lines. So this is where we started. In addition to those visualizing like unseen, we also can visualize how they sink in geometrical ways. Michael Faraday is also one of the scientists that Albert Einstein admired. There were three portraits in Albert Einstein's study. As Newton, Michael Faraday and James collect Maxwell. They are all visual thinkers. They sink in visual and geometrical ways. And we believe that we can, in VR, it's a perfect medium to visualize in those geometrical ways. And maybe we can turn those math become interactive and make them easier to learn. So it's hard to communicate those science concepts without you understanding it and use it. So that's the idea that we designed those visualizations. So on the left side, if you Google magnetic field, that's what you can find. However, if you come to Science VR, if you put on the headset, we will take you back to the stories where Michael Faraday discovered those invisible field lines around the magnet. And you can use your hands to really pick up the magnet and see the full science and to really experience what it's like in front of you. So we find that very powerful to bring the STEM concept in front of you and allow you to use your hands. So, well, you can argue that you can go to Exploratorium. That's a very fun place where you can interact with electromagnetic apparatuses like using your hands. These are very fun installations in Exploratorium. And, well, you can also go to Faraday Museum where you learn about the stories. However, you're not allowed to touch those apparatuses because they are vintage and they're so important that they're in a museum. In VR, this is a place we can combine the two where you still use your hands. And also, VR will take you back to the 19th century where Faraday and Maxwell, they discovered electromagnetism. It will be like this. So you and your friend or your teacher and your classmates can all go into Michael Faraday's laboratory where you share the same setup and discuss physics with Michael Faraday. So, I'm going to show you a video and I'm going to also talk about some of the labs in this video. And this is partially founded by Epimetrograms. This is me typing on an Enigma machine. That's the machine that World War II, a lot of young smart scientists want to break it. Mr. Faraday, this is the talented pupil I mentioned to you before. Mr. Faraday explored a series of experiments demonstrating the connection between electricity and magnetism. So we call him the father of electromagnetism. This is Faraday's lab. This is a circuit that you can interact with. Of course, the compass and magnet invisible forces. This is Auster's discovery of the first electromagnetic apparatus. In his right hand over there, this is Nikola Tesla. Tesla coil and Tesla tower. How about Earth's planet that adjusts the year and see our world. This is a bit of a difference engine. There's infinite differences to calculate the polynomial. And they are loveless. This is a bomb machine designed by Eleturin. It's very easy to take more than nothing. All right, all right. Check the logic. Watch me carefully. Check the sphere in some line string. Committee. Down-take. Inferno. Let's hear what Ed was thinking. The science VR is like more like a classroom that you can learn stuff. Like, for example, Michael Faraday. He is like the teacher of the classroom. And he teaches us magnetic fields and how magnets make energy. Michael Faraday is like the science teacher. The first is you get the idea and you learn something about them. And then the second part is when you get really interested in it and you want to play it again and again to see which details you didn't notice before. And the third part is when you really want to search up other books to help you study about them. So that's some comments from Ed. Actually, the video was recorded about one and a half years ago, almost two years ago. I want to take you to some of the immersive science lab we built, ADAS Engine. We rebuilt ADAS Workshop with some publications and also some of our imagination. So this machine in the middle is the analytical engine where, if I quote Ada, she said that this machine can be used to program points or even music. And the machine would do exactly what you wanted to do. And she called it this kind of science. It's a science of operations. So if you put one step after one another, so that becomes a procedural. And the machine will follow procedure to execute one after another. And in this case, we redesigned analytical engine and with a piano keyboard. So any users who doesn't know about programming, they can create some inputs from the keyboard just like you play piano and use those handles and buttons to modify the inputs, which is exactly like a program. So as you tinker around the piano keyboard and the control panel, essentially you're building your first musical program. Galvanist frog. This is where electricity was used to life. Electricity was used around the animal bodies. And Galvanin found out that a frog found that twitch when you put metals around it. In fact, it's not really electricity. What's not from the frog is from the two metals, two different metals touching each other. So in this experiment, our users would be able to explore and discover what kind of combination of metals would make the frog twitch. This is actually very important because it leads to the discovery and invention of a battery. Tourist elements, Mary Curie and Pierre Curie, we want to bring their journey of discovering polonium and radium. So those two elements, when they were working together, those were the two elements they discovered by purifying pitch-blend and they named those two elements themselves. Carol's Riddles. This is a VR experience that blends two books. One book, Alice in Wonderland, and another book, The Game of Logic. Both books are written by Lewis Carroll. Carroll himself was a mathematician and logician. So this experience, we want to challenge our users to think about symbiotic logic by solving Riddles. This is a fun one. Our committee is Heat Rate. This one, our users will go back to the ancient Greek to help defending enemies coming from the coastline by pointing mirrors at them. Of course you have to calculate geometry and trigonometry to figure this out. And you're part of the early Greek mathematician story. Shelly's Creation. I think we have a video for it. In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland and became the makers of Lord Byron and approved a wet and genial summer, and the assistant reign often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. We will each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron. I visited myself to think of a story. A story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror. Want to make the reader direct to look around to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the home. Shelly's Creation, sci-fi and biology. Mary Shelly was the author of Frankenstein. So I really like the quote that he said, science is hard because it takes a lot of imagination. And in this experience, we are making one of his inventions that led him to the Nobel Prize, the Feynman's Diagram. So in this diagram, you can play with the combinations that electrons and other particles interact with each other. By interacting with each other, you can also control the flow of time. For example, if an electron moving still the flow of time and a positron in Feynman's Diagram, it's equivalent to an electron but that carries positive charge moving back in time. So in this experience, we let you to use your hands to experience what is Feynman's Diagram, what is electron, what is positron, how they are different. And when they interact with each other, there might be light and radiations. So it works through a few science labs and they're not the full list. The full list is that we're thinking about maybe we can build a scientist-philosopher thinker in psychopedia in virtual reality. So this image is the Temple of Aten with Plato and Akhen and Socrates in the middle and I think there are some more thinkers around. I hope we can build this kind of universe where any learners can go inside the story first before they start to learn anything. And if they find out what they want to learn and they're interested in learning that more so they can go for it. They can see and explore great stories in the history that will lead them to the knowledge that influenced our society today. So I think that what we found is like a wiki of a lot of stories but in VR. When we bring science VR to museums, to places, our users always lined up and when they are lining up, they chat about science and they help each other to figure out things. This is a wonderful thing to witness. It's not only that they are learning science but they are chatting and having fun together. One of our young learners said that I just experienced the future of education and we were presenting in schools and conferences, museums and it's quite interesting to see young learners that can learn about how to use controllers and navigate through this virtual environment and also learn something from it, take home those memories with them. What we want to do is very like this image where Michael Faraday, he was lecturing and doing live demonstrations to women and children and to the general public so that science is not only belongs to certain group of people but belongs to the public. So anyone who can put down a headset and witness how science was discovered use your hands to tinker and participate and be part of the historical story. This is what we want to do. This is the second hive. I want to talk about the game development for young learners. I'm going to talk about two case studies, Aaron and Ed. This is a photo that we went to hack a sound together. In the back, of course, there are VR headsets and gaming laptops. For Aaron, he was a high school intern. Now he's in college. He was a very good self-motivated student and I think he learned coding before being an intern. He was an intern at a very early stage of science VR where we don't have published any immersive lab yet. At that time, he helped us to study and research Charles Babbage's different engine and he helped build the first prototype in VR so that we can have our other users to share what he built. He did research and he dig into Charles Babbage's publications to figure out those gears. Those gears are a way that Charles Babbage used to represent numbers. If you think about the tees on one gear, those are very much like numbers. The gear has 10 tees, that would be 1 to 10. If you want to calculate 2 plus 3, you can turn 2 tees and then turn 3 tees more. That represents 2 plus 3. By arranging those operations, you can actually compute fairly complex polynomials. That's when Charles Babbage finds out by building a machine that he can use that to calculate polynomials. He helps bankers to calculate the interest, for example. Our intern Aaron, he studied this machine. I think it's quite good for high school to take on a project that they have to master a historical idea and build it. The second one, we're going to talk about Ed. He's been working with me to build games, so I serve as a mentor and coach. We were attending hackathons, and he also presented his game in Science Fair, School Science Fair. He photos that we took during the hackathon in Science Fair, where he built a project that makes math more fun to learn. The tool we use is Unreal Engine. I think this is a very powerful tool for young learners because it has this visual programming part. It's quite similar to Scratch that has a visual interface. However, in Unreal Engine, this is the game engine where the AAA studio, they use the game engine to build high-quality games that we can download from Comsul, from iPhone, from PS4. This is a very powerful tool with a visual programming interface. I think because of the visual interface, it makes it much easier to follow when there's a YouTube video because typically they will talk about how it works and will play around the visual interface and do demonstrations so that it will be, I think for young learners, the visual way makes it much easier for them to learn. For Ad, not only we try Unreal Engine, it's quite good now. We consider himself as an intermediate game developer. He's making games and having fun with it. We also try having him to learn about Python programming. Python is much more abstract compared to Unreal Engine because game engine is quite visual and there are 3D elements of it and it's more like a game. For Python, you basically work with strings, like a series of English characters. To process those characters, it takes some trainings. We have to take some Coursera Python course related to stream processing. However, I found that it's hard to motivate him to do Python programming, so I also got inspired from other YouTube videos from com.ai to process coronavirus genomics using Python. The genomics there is a huge stream with only 4 characters, ACGT. In this way, I think it motivates Ad to do the inquiries of nature as well as doing Python programming. We talk about Ad and it's been attending Hackersound with me. Hackersound is also a very good place where you can spend the weekend and do some hands-on exercises. I think the hands-on practice is super important for mastering the skills that he learned from videos. We work together almost every day since the pandemic because of school closure. Usually, I'll send him some YouTube links for the tasks he needs to do this week. Of course, I'll be around for him to ask questions. I think that's also an important aspect to provide a supportive environment for him to not get too frustrated when bumping into things that he cannot overcome. So a long time he was watching and following YouTube videos and tutorials. I think practicing daily really helps. Of course, a good coach and take assistant around him to solve things that might stop him to learn. That's also very important. In this presentation, we talk about Immersive Science Lab. That's mainly from ScienceVR's virtual labs. By providing this playful learning environment where our users put on a headset, we will teleport them into the historical stories and allow them to be part of it and using their hands to tinker around and to learn about ideas that influence our modern society. We also talk about game development for young learners. I present you two case studies. One is our high school intern, another is my son who is programming with me. I think the key things are we need to enable them to tinker. We need to provide a supportive environment where if they have questions again, they are able to get answers quickly and providing good materials. For Aaron, it will be historical stories. For Ed, there will be the games that he wants to build and have fun, because that's what drives them to move forward. Alright, I think this is it. This is Jackie Lee. Thank you very much.