Sparking a Passion for STEM, Part 3: Q and A with Vanden High School’s Betsy Huynh
Earlier this week, we announced our partnership with educational nonprofit Ignited, through which four teachers were embedded on the Oculus campus for summer fellowships. Yesterday, we sat down with TIDE Academy Physics Teacher Ryan Stagg to talk about his work with the Reliability Engineering Team. Today, we’re chatting with Education Consultant and Vanden High School Science Teacher Betsy Huynh to learn about her experience.
Betsy Huynh: Hi! My name is Betsy Huynh, and I am a high school science teacher at Vanden High School in Fairfield, CA. This will be my fifth year teaching. I will be teaching Conceptual Physics and Biotechnology this coming year. I received my BS in Genetics, my teaching credential, and my MA in Education from UC Davis (go Aggies!), and I am also a Specialized Secondary Programs (SSP) mentor with the California Department of Education and travel around the state to different school sites in order to help them complete SSP grants.
BH: My school site starts extremely early (first bell rings at 7:45 am!), so I’m usually on campus well before 7:00 am. I use this time to prep for the day’s lessons, whether it’s setting up a lab, organizing my room, or just making copies. During lunch, I act as club advisor for two clubs: the National Art Honors Society and the Competitive Gaming Club. I also use my lunch period to prep for my afternoon Biotechnology classes, as their labs often use reagents that need to be mixed before use. After school, I usually leave my classroom open for at least an hour for students to come in and get help or make up missed assignments. I use this time to clean up, prep for the next day, and/or grade as well. This after-school time is also taken up by meetings—teachers are required to attend a lot of meetings! It’s rare that I leave work before 4:00 pm on a typical work day, and there’s always some grading that gets taken home at the end of the day.
BH: I learned about Ignited through another teacher I met at a training earlier this year. It sounded interesting, so I looked it up, saw a posting for a position at Oculus, applied, and the rest is history!
BH: A virtual reality game center opened in Vacaville just a few miles from my school in late 2016 or early 2017. The owner was kind enough to invite local teachers in to try the educational programs, and I certainly wasn’t going to refuse! That was my first experience with HTC Vive and VR in general, though I had heard about VR games and headsets like Rift and Google Cardboard before. I had a lot of fun playing around in Modbox and experiencing The Body VR.
BH: One of the main strengths of VR is its ability to allow for immersive and interactive experiences that can’t be done in a regular classroom. There’s a big push in education right now for “authentic” learning experiences—project-based learning, engineering challenges, field trips, etc. Unfortunately, due to cost and safety concerns, not every class will be able to build a robot or travel abroad as part of a lesson. Yet there are apps that let you tour the International Space Station or the tomb of Nefertari. Could you imagine a VR program that lets you experience the storming of the Bastille or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? VR could be an invaluable resource, providing students opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.
BH: I worked closely with another teacher fellow, Bryan Reed, as an education consultant on the Oculus Education Team. I was responsible for familiarizing myself with both Rift and Oculus Go to better understand the logistics of using VR in the classroom. I also explored the social and educational programming currently available on both headsets to identify use cases and creative applications to deliver impactful learning experiences and to identify capabilities needed to make VR practical for classroom use. I also spent a bit of time experimenting with 180° and 360° pictures and video in VR.
BH: I’m hoping the feedback Bryan and I provided will help with the development of more robust educational VR apps. A lot of the apps we looked at were interesting and immersive, but we couldn’t think of a way to make them fit into a lesson without feeling forced. VR has a lot of potential, but it needs to add something to the lesson that is above and beyond what is already available in order to make it useful. There were some programs that we really liked, and we’ll definitely be sharing them with our colleagues when we return to our classrooms!
BH: As part of my Ignited fellowship, I created an Educational Transfer Plan (ETP) that helps translate what I learned while working at Oculus into something I can bring back to my school site. I created a professional development course for teachers who want to use VR and 180°/360° video in their classrooms or for teacher research. I think it would be especially useful for preservice or first-year teachers to record their classroom using a 360° camera and watch it back in a VR headset so they can better inform their teaching. This will also allow teachers to familiarize themselves with VR so that they will be more likely to incorporate it into their classrooms as it becomes more affordable.
BH: My first couple weeks here were spent mostly in VR. I wanted to try all of the educational apps and knew I was only going to be around for a short time, so I downloaded as many as I could and tried them all. Bryan and I were then able to write up weekly reports to share with Oculus Education with our suggestions and questions about the apps we tried. We were asked to look at six social and creation apps specifically: Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, Facebook Spaces, Quill, Tilt Brush, and Oculus Medium, so we spent a lot more time with those than the other apps. We presented a summary of our activities and thoughts in a brown bag lecture.
I found the culture and working environment at Oculus really interesting. I went straight into teaching after graduating college, though I had some bench experience from my time in a lab during university, so I never had the opportunity to work in a large company like this. I plan to share this experience with my students when I return to my classroom. Companies like Oculus and Facebook provide a lot of perks for their employees and are great places to work, but they demand excellence in return. Of course, the VR was neat, too.
— The Oculus Team
