My name is Jenn Nester and I am a grad student in the College of Education. I got my first masters in Special Education from Lehigh almost 20 years ago and spent more than a decade modifying and adapting English curriculum for at-risk high school students in an alternative secondary school in New Jersey. For the next six years, I taught British Literature in a traditional high school and hit roadblock after roadblock trying to adapt the curriculum to fit student needs. I came back to Lehigh to study how technology might help all teachers adapt and modify curriculum for all students.
I have been working on the watershed project for the last several months, a project that is focused on designing, developing, testing, and implementing an immersive virtual reality (iVR) project for STEM education to promote engagement and learning about spatial watershed features and environmental issues in the Lehigh River watershed. My involvement in a project that seeks to advance a novel approach using iVR learning with place-based learning and game design principles has contributed tremendously to my research. I enrolled in this course to transition from the Master’s portion of of Instructional Technology to the doc program with my research into using immersive virtual reality games that simulate real-life situations as an alternative to traditional standardized tests. I envision this course will make me a better Instructional Technology student in that I will have the opportunity to create and test virtual reality experiences and games as part of the project. I also look forward to publishing papers that support the idea that virtual reality can do what multiple choice tests only try to do, assess a students’ knowledge in context.
“The World Health Organization estimates that over one billion people who need eyeglasses do not have access to them. The vast majority of these people live in developing countries like Kenya where there is barely one optometrist per one million people. Given the high poverty levels, access to eyeglasses is almost nonexistent. Lack of proper eyeglasses severely impacts people and their livelihoods by decreasing their productivity at work, limiting or eliminating new opportunities, affecting their quality of life, deteriorating their general health and possibly leading to (preventable) blindness.” If my task is to solve this problem, I can’t help but put my focus on technology. While I take both my children to an optometrist yearly, I can see how technology can replace her. There is an app that you can use that will measure your PD (pupillary distance), an important number when making/getting glasses. My boys’ optometrist isn’t responsible for getting their PD (even though they both wear glasses), that is a job for the optician. The optician’s job can be done by an app, why not the optometrist’s? In fact, digital imaging technology already assists the high-paid optometrist in diagnosing vision problems. With research, this technology has the potential of becoming mobile. Having spent hours in Oculus headsets, playing games and solving problems, it occurs to me that this very technology might be the answer. Newer versions of virtual reality(VR) sets are equipped to collect data on player responses by looking at where the eye is directed. A mobile app could be developed for VR that uses the same kind of data collection to diagnose vision problems. There can be an app for anything, but deploying it in an area such as Kenya presents a whole different set of obstacles than deploying it in America. The deployment of such a technology would be a perfect project for Global Impact fellows as the obstacles faced may be similar to those faced in Sierra Leone, but diagnosing vision problems is the first hurdle. Once my son’s myopia was diagnosed, it cost us more than $400 for his first pair of glasses. He was five. Five-year-olds are tough on everything, glasses were not the exception. He went through three more pairs, including an “indestructible” pair that lasted until his prescription changed. Not a workable model for the one billion people in need in Kenya. There are places on the internet where you can get prescription eyeglasses for as little as $7 which is certainly a better option. In addition, donation centers could set up areas likely to have access to glasses people no longer use might be a good way to get necessary stock. Google has been making VR goggles out of cardboard and while cardboard glasses might not be the most durable. Using the mobile diagnostic app, it would be possible to make glasses in bulk to lower the cost.