Teaching Archaeology through Virtual Reality – LAS Teaching Academy

Digitally-empowered Learning: Teaching Archaeology through Virtual Reality and Game-Based Learning

Professor Laura Shackelford discusses her NSF-sponsored project to develop an immersive, interactive, room-scale virtual reality (VR) archaeological site. The technology and curriculum enable faculty to teach the physical methods of archaeological excavation by providing the setting and tools for a student to actively engage in field work from within a VR lab. Such an approach also enables professors to teach archaeological concepts using a scientific approach to problem solving by couching them within a scientist’s context. While the specific problem domain is archaeology, this research promises a learning methodology and technology that will be widely applicable to other disciplines and subject areas, resulting in the widespread development of VR curricula that promote scientific thinking and problem-solving skills.  (Further details are available at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1736235&HistoricalAwards=false.)