Is it really possible to know if you want to be a nurse, or a police officer, or a skydiving instructor if you’ve never actually experienced a day doing one of those things?
Students in Chicago Public Schools are now getting a chance to experience all of these careers with the help of virtual reality (VR). Matt Wren, a tech expert and founder of VRAR Chicago helped make it happen, and he joined WBBM Newsradio’s Andy Dahn on the Noon Business Hour to explain how it works.
“Our team walks in, we sort of section off the gym floor into, 10-foot by 10- foot spaces so that the students each have their own individual space, and then we… set up the VR headset… we kind of run it in sort of classroom sessions so that 24 students at a time are able to just come in, do their simulations, and as they move on, 24 more come in behind them.”
During those simulations, students get to choose multiple simulations from more than 100 options. Wren said there’s everything from, medical and healthcare type professions to teaching, to research and science, construction jobs and first responder emergency services.
“There’s lots of different jobs… I will say some of the ones that are definitely more popular tend to be, you know musing and medical and healthcare related… those were popular,” Wren told Dahn. “There are some of them that are kind of out there though… there was one that was skydiving instructing a lot of kids really liked that one.”
He also explained that the simulations take students through a day in the life of the professions they choose. Since the program is a 360-degree virtual reality environment, they can look all around them to see what’s happening.
Wren said the simulations “can be really valuable because ultimately, if there’s a career that they might be interested in, but then once they see what the day to day is like, they might not be interested anymore,” and it can literally open their eyes to the possibilities of careers they might not have considered. So far, he said students have been really interested in the experience.
“When I’m talking with the principal and we’re in a… school gym with 30 middle schoolers and you can hear a pin drop… you can’t buy that kind of engagement,” Wren said. “It’s amazing to watch it happen. These kids just get into it.”
