Back in July High Fidelity lanuched its Stem VR Challenge. The challenge was :
High Fidelity will be awarding up to three $5,000 grants to teams or individuals who, using the High Fidelity platform, can create a unit that is:
- HMD (e.g. Oculus™) featured
- High school age appropriate
- STEM focused
- Social (can be experienced by >3 people together)
In addition to the dollar amount awarded, grantees will have access to technical support directly from High Fidelity and the option to have their content hosted.
Yesterday High Fidelity announced who the recipients would be, they have chosen two projects to receive the grants. They are T.C.a.R.S: Teaching Coding – a Racing Simulation and FTL Labs PlanetDrop-VR. Both projects look very interesting.
TCars is a combination of code and fun and is described as :
An awesome racing game where you get to interact with JavaScript to customize your car’s handling, create unique power ups and optimize performance through editing the programme code with the use of the Blockly API.
The idea behind TCaRS is explained as one that wants people to learn coding by having fun :
The idea for TCaRS is based on the thought that learning coding can be boring but playing games is fun: “I want to learn to code… but….the road from typing, ‘print my name’ to making ‘Grand Theft Auto’ seems huge and demotivating”
Schools around the world have been using tools like the Raspberry Pi to teach kids coding and it’s an essential part of most High School curriculums these days, but the output from tools like this is often pretty basic-looking.
With High Fidelity, we have the chance to change this by creating the first gaming platform where users get to see and interact directly with elements of the code in order to gain
advantage – so the more you learn, the better you do. And with the benefit of VR to create a genuinely immersive experience.
The people behind TCaRS are High Fidelity Alpha users Thijs Wenker (Thoys in High Fidelity) Programmer / Web Developer (JavaScript, PHP, C#, C++) and Dan Grundy (Judas in High Fidelity) Lecturer in 3D modelling using Blender. There’s a lot more detail in the link.
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