The North Pennsylvania School District (NPSD), with funding from its Educational Foundation, has struck an academic partnership with Unity Technologies to launch a high school spatial computing programme for the 2021 to 2022 academic year.
The NPSD course is the first of its kind and was co-created with Notiontheory, a global leader in cross reality (XR) education and solutions, who brought Unity’s Academic Alliance and the NPSD together.
The course will start this month and aims to prepare North Penn high school students for technical proficiency in designing and publishing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications.
XR Today spoke with Kurt Reichwein, NPSD Department Chair of Technology and Engineering Education, Donna S Dome, NPSD Curriculum Supervisor of Secondary STEM, and Kristian Bouw, Founder and Chief Scientist at Notiontheory.
XR Today: How did Notiontheory, Unity and the NPSD come together?
Curt Reichwein: Dr Kurt Dietrich, our district superintendent, goes to church with a gentleman who worked for AT&T, who discussed this project they were working on with Magic Leap and thought, “This is something you guys should look into for your school. This is great technology.”
But along comes the [COVID-19] pandemic, and my focus goes away from this [spatial computing course] back to teaching, and I decided I better get back on this, because the course is rolling out this fall. I return to my notes and reach out, but Magic Leap is gone.
I reconnected with Kristian and Unity’s Stuart Trafford, and Donna, myself, and Kristian met weekly for a couple of months figure out how to get the programme back on track after Magic Leap fell out of the education picture.
They gave us some really great advice and taught us a lot about some things that were unknown to us. There’s still a lot of unknowns, based on the content, because this is all brand new.
I have to remind myself we are a high school doing something that a high school’s never done before, anywhere in the world, to the best of our knowledge, and North Penn is used to being ‘first’ in a lot of things. It’s just something we do.
Kristian Bouw: We’ve had a kind of longstanding partnership with Unity, especially in education, and as Curt mentioned, we had a prior strong relationship with them. So, it just seemed like a generally good fit when Unity launched its Academic Alliance.
When we sought to do that, North Penn came along at the right time and were very quick to adopt it.
This works like a comprehensive benefits programme for organisations joining the unique academic alliance, who receive up to 70 percent discounts on new products and education credits for certifications. The programme offers a wealth of benefits and we are looking to extend this to K-12 institutions.
XR Today: How is the NPSD preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow?
Curt Reichwein: Whether it costs ten bucks or ten thousand bucks, success is always the key element for us because, again, it’s about kids developing and learning. In my department, we live by the whole mantra of “We train our students for jobs that don’t exist yet.”
Kristian Bouw: “At North Penn, there is an insatiable appetite to understand and figure things out to determine where we will go next. The school always works to anticipate the needs of students and in doing so, asks, “What are going to be the jobs of tomorrow, and how can we prepare students for them?”
Speaking on the broader impact of the programme, from our view, AR/VR is the next evolution of general purpose computing. The thought that we will be stuck on laptops with 13-inch screens and just move our hands up and down on a 2D-plane with a mouse seems quite archaic.
So, North-Penn bought into that same idea and vision of AR/VR being this next general-purpose computing medium, recognising very early on they wanted to give students a head start and advantage.
Seeing the growth of the industry, along with the discrepancy between the current industry demand for AR/VR creative talent and the actual supply available, North Penn’s really setting these students up for success. I think what’s clear on the education side is there is a clear opportunity to transform not only the educational content itself, but also its’ delivery.
One of the long term goals is that the projects these individuals work on actually seed into and cross pollinate with other areas, because students are additionally taking many other classes and will encounter ideas of how to transform educational content and increase engagement.
XR Today: Can you tell us about the funding opportunities offered by the NSPD Educational Foundation?
Curt Reichwein: Our Educational Foundation is headed by Christine Liberaski, who brought together the board of directors, and I sat and made a long presentation to them and they said, ‘I will pay for that’.
Then the next thing comes along and they say, “We’ll pay for that, and I’ll tell you what, we’ll just pay for everything that’s on this list here right now.” So now this virtual reality thing is suddenly very real to us.
They back a lot of things we can’t typically afford out of our budgets, so anything beyond that is funded by our Educational Foundation, a non-profit organisation, who also largely funded this.
It’s not done without the support of our community and Educational Foundation, who are all important players in this — everybody from our administration, down to former students and parents who donate in our name, are what drives us.
Donna S. Dome: The biggest thing, and Curt had mentioned it, was how none of this would be possible without our Educational Foundation.
