HELENA — Students at Project for Alternative Learning are getting a whole new perspective in the classroom without ever leaving their seats. The school has rolled out virtual reality headsets to bring lessons to life.
“You are completely in a different world," student Marin Salisbury says. “I felt like I was standing in an operating room.”
(WATCH: Helena students get a look into their futures with virtual reality)
An operating room, a fire, or a mechanic shop are just a few of the things PAL high school students can experience within the walls of their classroom, thanks to virtual reality headsets.
“We have been using it for learning purposes,” Bridger Mason, a PAL student, says. “There are tons of tons of different courses we have available to us.”
The three headsets were bought with funds from the Helena Chamber of Commerce.
The virtual reality class is three weeks long, and it gives students the opportunity to experiment with different career paths.
Tesha Aydlett performed a mock knee surgery and says, “It expands your learning because you are learning about the situations you would be in after a bunch of years of schooling, so you get to see if I really would be interested in going through all this learning.”
Through the headsets, students get to try many different jobs based on their interests and get them thinking about their futures.
“I do not know what I am going to do after high school and doing the VR thing, the headsets and the VR class definitely gets me an idea of what
I want to do and study after high school,” said Aryanna Despanie.
After the course is complete at PAL, the three headsets will make their way to courses at Helena and Capital High Schools.
