I’m a high school teacher that teaches Engineering at a public career tech school. We get students from 7 different high schools in our county. I started a joint project with our Engineering, Information Technology, and Programming classes to have a video game design challenge.
I purchased an Oculus Rift DK2 and computer with personal money (insert broke teacher joke), and we were generously donated a graphics card by NVIDIA. I added Unity to all of the computers in our lab, as well as Unreal Engine, Kodu, Scratch, and more. Our students have made TONS of progress and learned more than I ever expected they would. One group modeled a virtual world that included 3D objects they designed to represent each of the classes at our tech school with photos from our classes embedded in the world. They demo’d this project to literally hundreds of people at an education celebration event where thousands attended and caused the superintendent to push more game development and virtual reality in our schools. Another group added a complete Oculus driving station to a robot used in FIRST robotics competition.
Since then, we’ve had students a good number of students get certified in 3D modeling with Autodesk software, and now we are having a game design challenge to see how well they can work together on a larger scale gaming project. I think it would really be a great thing to reward the winning team with their own Oculus Rift DK2 so they may continue development as a team outside of school to publish a commercial project. If anyone here wants to help contribute toward the $372 it will cost to get an Oculus Rift in their hands, please visit this GoFundMe project: http://www.gofundme.com/k4dmdk. If you can’t donate, please share this and encourage your friends to share it. I believe your support can literally change the futures of these students by placing technology in the hands of future game designers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to learn this much this soon in life. Thanks for all of your support.