Educators#
The VirtualShip software is used as part of the VirtualShip Classroom, which combines authentic tools with VR to create a virtual fieldwork experience and allows you to teach about sea-based research from your regular classroom. All VirtualShip Classroom (VSC) material is open under an MIT licence and freely available! You can use the VSC to teach anything from a four-hour masterclass up to an open assignment of more than 40 hours.
Our core learning outcome is for students to appreciate the difficulty of measuring the ocean, making the VSC a valuable tool for students that will go into fieldwork, modelling or anything else. Additional Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) were formulated in collaboration with ocean scientists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and Utrecht University (UU).
Note
The VirtualShip Classroom is focused on creating didactically sound, authentic learning experiences grounded in established learning theories in science education, such as constructivism (Piaget 1954) and constructionism (Papert 1980). By integrating realistic tasks and a gamified narrative approach, students learn within a digital replica of the real world, constructing knowledge through ‘learning by doing’ and ‘trial and error’ as they explore oceanography concepts, research methods, and analysis tools.
Tip
For more information on the pedagogical approach employed in the VirtualShip Classroom, including evaluation in several (under)graduate courses, see our Publications page.
In summary, we find that the VirtualShip Classroom is highly engaging, and students report on enhanced confidence and knowledge (Daniels et al. 2025).
Implementing the VirtualShip Classroom#
We’re pleased that you’ve chosen to use VirtualShip in your teaching! We provide a “Train the Teacher” guide below, which is designed to help you, as the teacher, to get started with the platform and make the most of its features in your classroom.
Implement the VirtualShip Classroom in your teaching with our step-by-step guide for educators.
Assignments & Teaching Materials#
We also provide a set of assignments and teaching materials, which you might find useful. Some of these are referred to in the “Train the Teacher” guide, but you can also explore them separately here.
Post-processing Tutorials#
As mentioned in the “Train the Teacher” guide, we provide a set of tutorials for analysing output from VirtualShip expeditions, which students can use as a starting point for their post-expedition analysis.
