Not every student finds it easy to let a novel come to life in their imagination. Could virtual reality help? Tiffany Capers gave it a try: She let her 7th graders build settings from Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” with CoSpaces and explore them in virtual reality. And: they loved it.

In this video, Tiffany and her students talk about their virtual reality literature project. Read on to learn more about their experiences and see some of the students works.

Literature and virtual reality doesn’t seem like the most obvious combination. What made you want to experiment with that?

Tiffany: The kids are so engaged when technology is involved. CoSpaces is just one example. They like to work on anything online. As long as they can take their ideas and turn it into something that is technological, they’re engaged and they’re involved.

Tiffany Capers works as a language arts teacher for Meadowbrook Middle School, Ohio. Together with her student teacher, she let the class recreate settings from “The Giver” in VR.

Maybe they just like the possibility to create something — rather than just consume literature?

Tiffany: I think it’s both. Yes, they like to be creative. And in our school system the expectation often is — at least, when it comes to my class — that they sit down and produce some form of written word with pencil and paper. With our VR project they could take it a step further: They took what they had created with pen and paper and did something much more hands-on with it.

How exactly did you translate scenes from “The Giver” into virtual reality with the students?

Tiffany: Like with anything that we do with technology, we had a first planning session with pen and paper. Each student chose a scene from “The Giver” and described the setting of this scene. Of course, we kept revising and improving these texts.

So the students first described a setting from the novel in words before they started building it as a VR scene?

Tiffany: Exactly. After they had finished their description, I let them go to CoSpaces and gave them some time to get used to the tool. Then they started creating their settings.

Once they were finished with their scene, each student had to pick three significant objects from their setting and then present to the class why they choose to include these objects. Explain what they meant to them in the context of the story as a whole.