This story was reported and produced by Trevor Lloyd.
Innovating education is a priority for T.H. Culhane, who brings virtual reality to his classroom
An associate professor at the Patel College of Global Sustainability at USF, Culhane is the director of the the college’s concentration in climate change and teaches courses in food sustainability, as well.
He got the idea to use the online virtual world Roblox for his classroom from his kids, whom he uses to communicate and play with while they are overseas.
Culhane uses virtual reality to give students the opportunity to start placing sustainability technologies and ideas in a world that goes beyond a two-dimensional plane offered in the physical classroom.
“I’m teaching vital subjects — climate change mitigation and adaptation, food energy and water and zero waste nexus thinking, envisioning sustainability,” Culhane said. “So, my goal is to make my class as exciting as National Geographic.”
He and his students believe in a sustainable future through technology and exploring the human mind through innovative technological tools that free a sometimes captive way of thinking.
“Humans are hungry for experiences that give them self-actualization,” he said. “VR lets you not just walk around and fly around but it lets you touch, move, size, change the scale, rotate, you start getting physically involved.”
Culhane says his “mission is to empower communities to regain ecological self-sufficiency and economic security through regenerative systems integration, believing that we have all the puzzle pieces to make thriving societies, and just need to come together and put them together,” according to his USF biography.
This is the first semester that he has used these VR tools to teach about the environment and sustainability. He has become an advocate for combining traditional learning and technology tools such as augmented reality and online games to give students a more engaging learning atmosphere.
“Students that have both experiences, real word and virtual world, understand concepts and do better than those that just have one or the other,” he said. “That’s the powerful combination.”
