VR escape room-
This article discusses the idea of creating a VR escape room. I am wondering about the possibility of creating a VR escape room game that focuses on important academic foundations in advancing reading, writing, history, and math skills. For dyslexia students, this would be a fun and active way for them to move around, pick up and open virtual objects, to hear realistic sounds through 360 audio in their headphones, and to enjoy the achievement of having escaped the room after successfully mastering a skill. The game would include multiple escape rooms that would focus on different academic subjects.
Many students that are struggling with dyslexia may not have the proper motivation and teaching approach to improve in these challenging academic areas. When they don’t understand the material right away, they may start feeling like a failure compared to the other students in their classroom. When a student feels this way, they tend to develop a fixed mindset that they will never be capable of mastering the skill, so they give up. These students tend to experience low self-esteem, which can manifest into more serious issues of depression, stress, and anxiety related conditions. Some students with dyslexia are bullied by other peers and adult figures that don’t understand their learning disability who won’t empathize with the hardships they are facing on a daily basis. THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE!! I would like to help develop an interactive virtual reality game to allow students to learn material at their own pace without being judged by other students.
I want this game to be fun and take some of the pressure off the student, who already feels enough stress from the long classroom hours sitting still at their desk. As someone with dyslexia myself, I need to constantly move around and apply material in a realistic context to fully understand the subject. The element of movement and multisensory approaches will be the focus when developing the structure of this game. The goal of this game is to help students build confidence and personal autonomy in their academic abilities, to help them see that trial and error is a part of the learning process, to develop a growth mindset, and to gain a personal and meaningful connection to the academic material.
