MELBOURNE and BOSTON
Students in Melbourne Australia and Boston Massachusetts take part in the world's 1st international Minecraft cultural exchange
Immersive Education (iED) students from Boston's Saint John School (SJS) today take part in the world's 1st international Minecraft cultural exchange with iED students from Melbourne, Australia. The event takes place at 11pm GMT today (6pm Boston, 10am Melbourne) and will be featured at Openworld this weekend and upcoming Immersive Education conferences.
During the cultural exchange iED students from Australia's Wooranna Park Primary School will host iED Boston students. The students will gather virtually in both the historic Dandenong Market and prestigious Royal Society of Victoria concept spaces that were recreated in Minecraft by the Australian students this year as learning activities in their Immersive Education club.
The iED Australian students will guide iED Boston students through Minecraft renditions of the marketplace and green space concept designs. During the virtual tour students from Boston will learn the cultural and historic significance of Dandenong Market, the Royal Society of Victoria, and Australia. Students and their iED Club teachers will discuss architecture and design, and conclude the cultural exchange by playing head-to-head Minecraft games with their iED counterparts from the other side of the globe.
Later this year the Boston students will, in turn, give the Australian students virtual tours of the immersive Boston Freedom Trail sites that the Boston students recreated in Minecraft. The cultural exchange includes Minecraft renditions of Boston's historic Old North Church, Paul Revere's house, and the Boston Tea Party.
Following today's inaugural event a full complement of immersive cultural exchanges will be open to all Immersive Education clubs and camps, and will feature immersive Virtual Reality (VR) using Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift, Sony Gear VR, and other VR headsets.
Photos and videos will be appear on Immersive Education's official Facebook page (https://facebook.com/ImmersiveEducation) and web site at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/news
THOUSANDS OF MEMBERS WORLDWIDE
The Immersive Education Initiative is a non-profit international collaboration of educational institutions, research institutes, museums, consortia and companies. The Initiative was established in 2005 with the mission to define and develop standards, best practices, technology platforms, training and education programs, and communities of support for virtual worlds, virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality, simulations, game-based learning and training systems, and fully immersive environments such as caves and domes.
Thousands of faculty, researchers, staff and administrators are members of the Immersive Education Initiative, who together service millions of academic and corporate learners worldwide.
Chapters support the rapid and continued growth of Immersive Education throughout the world, and constitute the geographically distributed structure of the organization through which regional and local members are supported and enriched. Chapters organize officially sanctioned Summits, Days, workshops, collaborations, seminars, lectures, forums, meetings, public service events and activities, technical groups, technical work items, research, and related activities.
Speakers at iED Summits have included faculty, researchers, and administrators from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MIT Media Lab, The Smithsonian Institution, United Nations (UNESCO; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), United States Department of Education, United States Department of the Interior (DOI) National Parks Service (NPS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Stanford University, Cornell University, UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates Planetarium, Walt Disney Company (Disney), Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Halliburton Company, Turner Broadcasting, Chukyo TV Broadcasting Company (Japan), Nikko Telecommunications Company (Japan), The MOFET Institute (Israel), Keio University (Japan), University of Tokyo (Japan), National University of Singapore (NUS), University of Lisbon (Portugal), Giunti Labs (Italy) and European Learning Industry Group, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), University of Barcelona (Spain), University of Oulu (Finland), Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD; France), Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Israel), Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (Israel), University of Vienna (Austria), Graz University of Technology (Austria), University of St Andrews (UK), University of Glasgow (UK), University of Essex (UK), Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (Hungary), University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS; Brazil), Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (India), and many more world-class organizations.
To learn more visit http://ImmersiveEducation.org
