DEM in virtual reality for STEM outreach

At The University of Sydney we are using DEM as our main STEM outreach tool. Around 1,000 high school students per year come to the University on a variety of outreach programs, and go through a DEM-based experience. The experience itself is in virtual reality, and is available open source for anyone to use by going putting on a VR headset and navigating here.

The activity takes around 30 minutes, and students are guided through the difference between a line, a disk, a sphere and a hypersphere. They then go on to play with a few interactive environments, and finally end up playing four dimensional pool with 4D hyperspheres. A browser-based version of this last activity is embedded below. We get lots of excellent feedback from this from participants, and it ties well with a couple of points in the Australian high school curriculum.

If anyone is interested in using this activity please feel free. If you would like to customise it for your own purposes it is also quite straightforward. The voice overs, order of activities, and adding/removing activities is all relatively simple, with a few examples here. Please email me at benjy.marks@sydney.edu.au if you have any questions or would like support making changes or getting this up and running at your institution.

Also check out our website here with more open source activities targeted at University level students.