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If you are lucky enough to have a more hi-tech virtual reality set up at your school, CoSpaces is also compatible with ClassVR and Pico.
Teaching and Learning in the Nest – Birdville Digital Learning
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Posted by Anonymous June 02, 2017
Create VR Experiences via CoSpaces
CoSpaces is an easy VR tool that allows users to create virtual reality experiences on a computer or tablet. Users begin by creating an environment or setting and adding customized objects to build their own world in the browser app. Users can add photos, text boxes, audio files, and speech bubbles. Objects can be made interactive through coding using both scripts or visual blocks, which is a good introduction to coding.
After creating in VR experince in a browser, users can utilize the CoSpaces app on their mobile device to experience their VR creation. Users login to the app to access content. Content can also be shared with others. CoSpaces is available in the BISD apps catalog.
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Our first rollercoaster in CoSpaces
Goal: Your goal is to make a fun and exciting roller coaster in CoSpaces, and learn how to use CoSpaces (without any Javascript…yet).
Opening a new space
- Click on My Classes and the class name, then open the Our first rollercoaster space.
- (Don’t make a new space in Free Play, because then your assignment won’t be automatically submitted to me).
Making the simplest rollercoaster possible
We’re going to add a bunch of cool stuff soon, but now let’s just get a really simple coaster running and check that it works.
Setting up objects
- In Library, under Special select the Round Path and place it somewhere in the Space.
- Move each of the blue nodes and change their height to create the roller coaster track
- Do something basic, we can keep editing this later.
- If the track dips underground, you can just change the height of the whole track.
- Later we can easily swap this for a rocket or pirate ship or skateboard.
Adding code to make the rollercoaster move
- In the top right corner, click Code and select CoBlocks.
- Click the blue Transform button and choose the second option
- “Move _ on path _”.
- Drag it to the right.
- In the top right corner, press Play!
- Congratulations, this is your first roller coaster! Now let’s jazz it up.
Making your roller coaster more fun
There are lots of things you can do. Read through all the ideas below and play around with some that appeal to you.
1. Changing the sled
- You can ride on lots of things. Search through the Library, how about a rocket, or pirate ship or a cow?
- You can stack multiple items: I made a dog riding on a skateboard i.e. a skateboard attached to the track, a dog attached to the skateboard and the camera attached to the dog.
2. Changing the camera perspective
- Right now the camera sitting exactly on top of the sled. Move it back and up – it will still remain attached to the sled and follow it around on the track, but the player gets a better view.
3. Changing colours
- Right click any object and select Material to change color (including the track).
4. Adding more nodes to the path
- Do you want a longer roller coaster or one with more twists and turns?
- Right click the path, and click Edit Path. If you hover over the path, you can add extra blue nodes.
5. Adding decorations and obstacles
- Add other objects around your roller coaster to decorate the scene or make the ride more exciting. Why don’t you get your roller coaster to:
- Fly over a tropical island
- Weave through skyscrapers
- Go through a dark tunnel (use the Tube item under Building)
- Avoid a snarling dragon
- Fall into the mouth of a shark
- You can right click things like animals and people and select Animation to make them perform different actions.
6. Give the space a background
- Next to Library select Environment and click Edit to choose a theme.
7. Add sounds
- Next to Library select Environment and click Stage Sound to add background music.
8. Make the roller coaster go forever, or only start when you click the sled
- To make the roller coaster go forever:
- in CoBlocks, under Control select forever and put your blue move block inside it. (In Javascript we would use something called a while loop instead).
- in CoBlocks, under Events select when ___ is clicked.
CoSpaces Edu
CoSpaces is a creation app built for the classroom which helps young learners develop virtual content. They design, implement, and code their ideas within the multi-format app to produce augmented and virtual-reality creations.
The app directly addresses STEM subjects, but its website provides examples of it being used across the world in support of topics as diverse as history and social-emotional development.
CoSpaces is entirely usable by students on free-to-download mobile apps or using the web app. While designed for school and classroom use, home schoolers and other parents can still use it by signing up for a single-teacher account. Teachers have access to more admin tools when they use the web.
Trial code: CoSEduAppTrial
Promo code: CoSEduAppPromo for 10% off on any CoSpaces Edu Pro online purchase until June 3, 2023.
Teacher Review
What is CoSpaces app?
CoSpaces has kid-friendly tools for young learners to create virtual spaces called CoSpaces. These are 3D environments populated with a built-in library of objects or files users import. Using visual tools and coding, kids turn these spaces into interactive playgrounds.
The app’s tutorial videos provide great ideas for what teachers and students can create in CoSpaces. These include storytelling experiences, virtual tours, games, simulations, and exhibitions. However, these aren’t rigid templates; kids could develop something unique or a combination of the above.
Kids can create and view on any platform with each having its pros and cons you’d expect. Desktop computers have the most screen space, making creating less cramped, but phones let kids create wherever they are. Kids use the tools within CoSpaces to build 3D experiences viewable on screens and through virtual reality headsets.
Phones also make viewing their worlds in VR easiest. However, switching devices to take advantage of the form factor is straightforward. Kids can create their projects on a computer and then explore them at home on their parent’s phones.
CoSpaces is compatible with different virtual reality headsets. A great option is one of the card-based headsets, which holds a phone-sized device, such as Google Cardboard. These are cheap and easily replaceable, so kids can take them home or make one.
If you are lucky enough to have a more hi-tech virtual reality set up at your school, CoSpaces is also compatible with ClassVR and Pico.
CoSpaces also has augmented reality (AR) capability. This feature needs a mobile device with the appropriate tech built in. AR works on the most recent Android and Apple mobile devices, but if you use older ones, check whether they have AR Core (Android) or AI Kit (Apple).
Kids can share their spaces by giving a code to other users.
What we love about CoSpaces app.
CoSpaces is truly multi-format with downloadable mobile apps for iOS and Android and fully functional web apps for Mac, PC, and Chromebooks. This flexibility makes it much easier for schools to use CoSpaces regardless of their device platforms and the number of devices of each.
The flexibility of each student’s experience in the app is first-rate. Teachers can differentiate each child’s experience through the setting of appropriate tasks, but kids can also complete them using tools suitable to their current ability. A great example of this is the coding aspect.
Coding is not a trivial skill to learn, so it is great to see that the app supports beginners with a Scratch-like block-based coding environment but lets advanced kids move on to a more powerful scripting language when they are ready.
CoSpaces also uses terms familiar to users of all types of creative software. Learning what these refer to in CoSpaces and how they apply to objects is another step for kids towards applying the skills they learn in CoSpaces to the software they use in the future.
It is tough to pick out features we love about CoSpaces because they all work so well together. The teacher’s tools make setting up projects easy, the kids’ tools reward imagination and creativity, and it feels like there is no limit to what kids can build.
What skills does it teach?
CoSpaces is a creative tool which provides practice and development of students’ skills on multiple levels. Building their projects will challenge kids to develop critical thinking and collaboration skills. Implementing their ideas will require them to develop their coding and design skills. The theme of their tasks set by their teachers can incorporate any other subject.
CoSpaces can find a place in the lesson repertoire of any teacher in any subject. A storytelling project could relate an event from history, a virtual tour could illustrate the features of habitat for science, and a game could utilise math knowledge.
What age is it appropriate for?
CoSpaces is flexible and accessible enough for kids throughout their time at school. The app is particularly good for kids aged between 7 and 12.
Is CoSpaces app easy to use?
Cospaces provides its challenge for students in all the right ways. Students will have to concentrate, practice, and think to realise their designs, but they’ll be learning, not struggling with opaque user interfaces or unintuitive features.
The tools for positioning items in the 3D world are excellent. Getting 3D objects to sit in just the right place is tricky in many apps, but in CoSpaces, the attach, snapping and group tools make them easy.
The teacher tools are straightforward, and their implementation resembles those of other educational apps with teacher admin tools. Plenty of support is available for Cospaces subscribers to understand how to use it and inspire their lessons.
There are tutorial videos available to help teachers and students understand the platform’s capabilities and usage.
How will students benefit?
Teachers want kids to show what they have learned. This requirement drives kids to put in the effort to learn and gives teachers confirmation that their students have understood. It can be quite a dull process, though.
Kids working on a project within CoSpaces will view the task far more excitedly than a worksheet. They can show originality and feel like they are making something, not just demonstrating they were listening. The enthusiasm will do more than get them to show what they know; it will encourage them to go further and to learn more to make their CoSpaces the best they can be.
CoSpaces is flexible enough to promote individual work and collaborative efforts. Teachers can allocate an assignment to a group that will work within that CoSpace to fulfil the requirements. Individuals can also work effectively on solo projects.
More able children will often have the confidence to build on a blank project and achieve their aims, but teachers can provide appropriate support to less able kids by giving a starting template. This adjustment can be a discrete distinction which won’t leave kids feeling singled out.
How will parents benefit?
When kids come home excited about their Cospaces projects and with a homework task based on them, the multi-format capability of the platform will make it more likely that their parents can find a device for their kids to use.
Kids are likelier to complete their CoSpaces homework than traditional worksheet tasks because of each project’s stimulating and varied possibilities. What parents wouldn’t want their kids to complete homework with less resistance?
How will teachers benefit?
It is much easier for teachers to base lessons around apps that work on many platforms. It makes booking enough devices for a whole class easier when free from sticking to a specific device type. It also makes it much easier to adapt if misfortune or another unexpected event stops one set of devices from being available at the necessary time.
CoSpaces provides a lot of support for teachers.
Its website includes many lesson plans which you can use as is or modify to meet your students’ needs. The site’s goodies section also has helpful printable resources such as lesson plans, a code blocks overview in poster form, student reward certificates, and keyboard shortcut cheat sheets.
The lesson plans are perfect for starting as they turn some administration into learning tasks. For example, one gets kids to create and personalise a name badge that will identify them in the virtual world.
The web app provides teachers with the tools to create, assign, share, and monitor assignments and tasks with their students. The monitoring takes place in real-time, which is very helpful. It saves teachers a lot of movement as they circulate the classroom to observe student progress.
Making teachers’ lives easier isn’t all it does, though. Kids get distracted and self-conscious when their teacher hovers nearby. You can see your class understands and is on task without your immediate presence putting them off.
Children forgetting passwords have derailed many lessons, but it is easy to rectify in CoSpaces from the teacher dashboard. Just select the child’s name and choose a new password to let them instantly get access.
What can CoSpaces app improve on?
It isn’t difficult to find or buy a VR headset for CoSpaces. However, having its own printable Google-Cardboard-style headset on the supporting website would be more convenient and helpful for teachers.
How much does CoSpaces app cost?
Your first step as a teacher researching CoSpaces for school use or as a parent considering it for homeschooling will be to sign up for a CoSpaces Basic account. This free plan restricts what it can do compared to the premium account. It includes thirty seats (student accounts) but limits the number of objects you can place in a scene. It is suitable for assessing the platform but too restrictive to do much for your lessons.
Educational institutes and schools subscribe for one year and choose the number of seats to include. Each seat can be allocated to a teacher or student and freely reallocated when necessary. School districts can also get a license for CoSpaces and have access to district-level tools. Different purchase models are available on the website and via device app stores. Consider which is appropriate and most straightforward for you to administer.
If your subscription lapses, you’ll lose access to the premium creation features of the app but will still be able to view existing content.
An add-on called Merge Cube is by no means essential but provides a virtual hologram-style creation tool. This extra is a separate purchase.
Access to Cospaces for students is always free.
Is CoSpaces app safe to use?
Parents and teachers should ensure kids use VR in a safe environment without tripping hazards or nearby objects.
Cospaces is designed for schools, classrooms and other children’s educational facilities. Its website declares it to be compliant with practices defined by COPPA, FERPA and GDPR.
Kids only need to enter the code from their teacher, their name, and a username. They do not need an email address. There should be no issue with kids entering only a first name and initial for their name, but the user name must be unique across the CoSpaces platform.
You can make it easier for kids to choose a unique user name by giving them a guiding format, such as a prefix like your school’s initials followed by a verb and a name.
Advertisements do not feature in the app, whatever tier you use, for either teacher or student users.
The terms and conditions of CoSpaces emphasise that appropriate permissions need to be sought before kids can create and use a CoSpaces account. Schools and teachers must have parental consent for their students to use CoSpaces. Students will need their teacher’s CoSpaces code to create a linked account.
CoSpaces emphasises that students and teachers should treat its platform as an extension of the classroom and apply the same standards of behaviour and interaction there as they would in the physical environment.
Overall rating of the app.
CoSpaces is a great purchase for a school because it offers something for every classroom, teacher, and student. CoSpaces brings the excitement and stimulation of using technology to lessons not well served by educational apps. Kids are used to gamified apps in math, but there are far fewer stimulating resources in other subjects.
With a subscription to CoSpaces, kids can build their creativity and problem-solving skills while driving their discoveries and understanding of any topic in any subject. Great teacher tools
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