At Chesapeake High School, students test drive cars, fly aircraft and ride boats through computer-generated landscapes in a new simulation program designed to train tomorrow's workforce, the Baltimore Sun reports.
The virtual laboratory, which cost Baltimore County Public Schools about $2 million, aims to bring real-world situations to students through 3-D simulations and problem-solving scenarios that could help students develop critical 21st-century skills.
The lab consists of two rooms: One is designated for group teaching — modeled after a similar space at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory — where students can communicate remotely with professional engineers at Lockheed and Northrop, among others; the other room has multiple stations for individual use, each equipped with three monitors and a throttle and joystick for navigation.
This year, students will use the lab in geometry and environmental science courses, and there are plans to expand offered subjects in the future. With the technology, teachers can create various scenarios to suit their purposes. For example, in an environmental science exercise with an accurately re-created Mount St. Helens, students act as investigators to find out what caused a fish kill at Spirit Lake.
"We need to teach our children where they are, not where we were," said Superintendent Joe A. Hairston. "What better way to do that than to put them in a real-life situation? This is a classic example of education in the future."
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