Virtual home care visit and augmented reality display exercise

Maija Rimpiläinen

Practising interaction with the customer in VR.

At Valkeakoski Vocational College, two learning environments were developed as a joint development with teachers. First, a virtual home care visit was built for the social and health sector, with the goal of learning how to plan a home care visit. Second, an AR exercise was built in business and commerce, where the task is to practice display in a sportswear store. Distance learning was also taken into account in the creation of the learning contents. Both learning contents are available in both distance and contact teaching.

Johanna Kaittola, a social and health care teacher who participated in the joint development of VR content, describes her experiences: “Through the game, the student gets a glimpse into the world of home care in a practical way and by combining different things studied in theory. Areas of home care such as e.g. planned activities, observation of the client's state of health and functional capacity, nutrition monitoring, medication, asepsis and matters related to recording can be studied alongside traditional methods also by playing. Teaching is also varied in this way and things are concretized into practical tasks in the game at a completely different level than in traditional classroom teaching. Students have experienced the game as an interesting and new way of studying. Especially when you can play the game with VR glasses instead of the browser version, the experience is quite amazing.”

Sorting out medicine during the virtual home care visit.

An immersive space was also built at VAAO in the spring, utilizing AR and VR equipment as well as 360 cameras to produce our own virtual teaching material and run existing simulations. Through VR hardware, an immersive experience is produced for the user and learning takes place safely in a virtual environment through experience. “Valkeakoski Vocational College's learning environments have developed and diversified during the academic year. The introduction of new technologies has been eagerly received. VR simulations can be introduced and utilized throughout the studies, which will diversify the educational institution's educational offer and will offer students a new innovative way to practice simulated situations in a virtual environment. At the same time, they become familiar with new technologies and practice the skills of the future. Different learners also benefit from different teaching methods”, says Kirsi Tyynelä, VAAO's Digital Learning Expert. 

At VAAO, enthusiasm has also stuck outside the project. Students have also been enthusiastic about building business content themselves and other teachers have also shown enthusiasm for the topic. “In addition to the VR pilot in social and health care and the business AR pilot, business economics students have designed and implemented virtual games for customer service situations and are also implementing a virtual implementation with the Sääksmäki project, which will implement a virtual tour of Voipaala Manor in Sääksmäki. Mercury students have also been 360-filming the Sääksmäki Cultural Trail sites. It is very great that various local actors and partners in Valkeakoski have been very enthusiastic about the opportunities brought by 360, AR and VR technology”, says Kirsi Tyynelä, Specialist of Digital Pedagogy at Valkeakoski Vocational College.

The students can practise different displays in a sportswear context.

Teachers who have participated in co-development now have the ability to build learning content in the future as well. The initial suspicion of learning skills has changed to satisfaction with accumulating one’s own skills. “This is great because the primary goal of 3DBear projects is not only to produce pedagogical and refined content, but to give teachers and staff the skills to produce content independently in the future”, says Sara Saloniemi, who was responsible for the project on the 3DBear side.

It seems that at VAAO the XR-development is just getting started. We are eager to see what they are up to next.

Johanna Kaittola, Social- and Healthcare Teacher at VAAO

Kirsi Tyynelä, Specialist of Digital Pedagogy at VAAO

Sara Saloniemi, project leader at 3DBear