ThingLink Spotlight: ClassVR and ThingLink Case Study: A Historic Virtual School Tour

Louise Jones February 5, 2020

Stewart’s Melville College is part of ESMS, a unique family of Independent Schools in Edinburgh, Scotland and has been providing education to boys for over 150 years. Stewart’s Melville College has a large school community stemming back many generations. Head of eLearning, Mr Luxford-Moore and the pupils wanted to be able to develop the ways they connect with the ESMS families, enabling all to experience the school whether they are young, old, near or far away, or physically unable to tour the school.

The intergenerational project was devised by the learners and encouraged by Mr Luxford-Moore to engage the school family community by creating an immersive virtual experience of the school for all. They wished to enable all generations to explore the whole school, showcase the archives including important historical artifacts – even include the friendly school ghost!

Using a Project Based Learning approach 10 pupils aged 8-11 years worked collaboratively to build a virtual tour of their school. They planned the viewer’s pathway, collaborated on points of interest, and created media to embed in the tour. Taking eight 360° images and linking them together, pupils explored how to add further images, text, voice and video highlighting special aspects of their historic school with interesting facts linking to former pupils. This created a student-led immersive introduction of the school which was shared with the school community and former students aged 80+ years triggering happy memories for many.

[INTERACTIVE TOUR OF HISTORIC SCHOOL]: Stewart Melville’s College Edinburgh

“This was an amazing experience and a true testimony to how collaboration can work in a cross-curricular context with children from Primary 4 to Senior 6. A true whole-school initiative! The children really enjoyed the project management experience and planning which went into the design and creation of their ThingLink. New skills were developed and the active peer support was evident throughout the time they had together. They had fun – and through the joyful and meaningful context of this eLearning project they also learned some interesting facts about the history of our school, met new people in different year groups and were able to work with autonomy and teamwork to create something which they are rightly proud to share.”

Mr Luxford-Moore, Head of eLearning at Stewart Melville’s College