The Verizon Foundation and NYC Media Lab have announced the ten winners of the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge. The winners will divide $1 million and get access to Verizon’s 5G Labs. They also will receive support from engineers and mentors. Winners will “bring select projects to life” in schools next autumn.
“5G technology will provide extraordinary opportunities in education,” Rose Kirk, Verizon’s Chief Corporate Social Responsibility Officer, said in a press release. “The students and teachers in our Verizon Innovative Learning Schools will be at the forefront of this innovation and among the first to explore these transformative 5G learning solutions.”
Here are the winning projects:
- 5G COVET (5G COSMOS Verizon Education Toolkit), New York University – A set of virtual educational labs, each forming a virtual room that students will visit – moving from room to room – similar to the popular “escape rooms” experience.
- 5G K-12 Robotics Classroom, Tufts University – A set of AR and VR tools for robotics in K-12 classroom that gives students clear understanding of the complex workflows of a robot.
- Geolocation AR Monuments, Movers and Shakers NYC – An interactive and animated AR experience featuring a series of new urban monuments of women and people of color. The content brings stories to life, enabling students to learn history in an immersive way.
- Lumovia, Georgia Institute of Technology – An interactive, mobile, augmented reality application that prompts students to complete real-world STEM learning “quests” in their everyday environments.
- Making Projects with Purpose in Immersive Media, The New School – Middle school students and the Parsons School of Design harness the power of Verizon 5G to co-create projects to strengthen social and educational engagement by using various immersive AR and VR technologies including Doghead Simulation’s rumii, a social-virtual reality space that enables students to collaborate and communicate in one room from anywhere in the world.
- Mapper’s Delight, Rap Research Lab – A multi-person mixed reality environment that allows students, through Hip Hop, to conduct sophisticated analyses using data science and visualization.
- Mixed Reality to Improve Social Skills, Columbia University – A mixed reality game that helps students with autism improve their social skills. Students will be able to read emotions and initiate conversations with multiple virtual characters in a room.
- Playgrounds Physics, New York Hall of Science – An app that makes physics fun and interactive, in the classroom and beyond. Students document their own bodies in motion, track the paths of their physical activities, and use onscreen data tools to analyze the variables of force, energy, and motion.
- The 5G Enabled Collaborative Mixed Reality Classroom, New York University – Students work together in teams to construct and manipulate virtual models, form hypotheses, and test those hypotheses in real time.
- Visceral Science: Grasping the Universe through Virtual Reality, Columbia University– An immersive VR experience exposing students to inaccessible realms such as atoms and particles, planets and stars, black holes and galaxies.
Finding uses for all the bandwidth that modern networks offer is not a trivial task. Last May, Verizon named some projects being undertaken at Alley, its 5G incubator. They are ChalkTalk (using interactive AR on mobile devices), ReCoVR (VR therapist-patient exercises focused on motor skill improvement), Arvizio (developing immersive mixed reality collaboration tools), BriefCam (using 5G’s high bandwidth and speed to perform in-depth intelligent analytics of HD) and LiquidSky (high-quality cloud gaming).
