Historic School Creates Their Own Virtual Tour with ThingLink and ClassVR

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. unnamed

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!

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Created with project based learning approaches

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 as interactive hotspots.

Taking eight 360° images and linking them together in a walkthrough virtual tour, 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.

The virtual tour makes connections between generations

ClassVR headsets provide a key immersive experience and added dimension for both young and older former pupils visiting the school during open days, including octogenarians unable to physically visit all the places in the school. The VR headsets’ immersive experience is able to trigger memories and stories of school life at ESMS which the former pupils were able to then articulate to current and prospective
pupils. Artefacts such as scrapbooks collated by pupils during World War II have been brought alive with stories provided by the former pupils through the intergenerational project with ThingLink and ClassVR virtual reality headsets.

“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

How you can create your own tour like this without a 360-degree camera

ThingLink has made virtual tour creation available and accessible to all with its web-based platform. There is no specific virtual tour software required. Simply sign up for your free account and start creating immersive content like this instantly! From 2023 it’s now even possible to create 360-degree tours without a specialist camera or equipment, with the incredible new Pano to 360 by ThingLink. Simply take a panoramic image on any mobile device (iOS/Android), upload to ThingLink and its converted for free to an immersive high quality 360 panorama jpg which can be used to create tours like this. Simply upload to your ThingLink account and start adding your interactive tags and linking your 360 scenes together with simple transitions to create a tour. The easiest way to become a virtual tour creator in minutes!