How did you come up with the four types of learning?

The real breakthrough was attending a conference at the National Academy of Sciences. Every presenter at the conference was an absolutely breathtaking speaker. The whole focus was on the role of technology and learning. But a couple days in, I showed up and noticed that halfway through the event, a lot of people were getting up for breaks. There were no breaks scheduled during the day. The interesting thing was that they stayed out in the hall talking to peers about what they’d just seen in the lecture. Here we had great speaker presenting, but they were in the hall talking. It was meeting a need. That night, I reflected on the day and came up with the idea of different learning spaces. I thought that maybe we could think about technologies to support these different ways of learning.

So what is an educational holodeck, anyway?

The science-fiction holodeck that came with Star Trek: The Next Generation was just an empty room that could become a whole simulation of anything. A Victorian drawing. An ocean-going vessel. Anything you wanted, it could become. That included furniture and everything, controlled by a computer. We don’t know how to fabricate holographic furniture that people can sit on, so we need real furniture, but we’ve taken a good-sized room and covered the surfaces, no external light coming in, and in the front of the room put a large projection screen. Our first was 10 meters across and 1.5 meters high, which is big. On the side of the room, there was an interactive whiteboard and around the periphery, personal computers. Kids come into the room to go on a mission.

One that we did was a mission to Mars, to let kids explore whether Mars has or had, life. There are challenges when you’re taking off in a spaceship, and they have to solve problems. It’s very interesting, because it’s an immensely interactive environment, and after a little while they almost feel like they’re there. When the students enter the room, it’s already up and going. It’s only after they’re out of the room that I turn everything off and it goes back to the regular room. And I feel a difference. It’s like, “Whoa, where’d my spaceship go?” I get a funny feeling in my stomach.

How did you judge the success of the holodeck?

We brought back a bunch of students one year later to revisit the holodeck and asked these kids to talk about what they knew about Mars. What they knew then was much more than what they knew at the end of the mission. They were so interested in it that they continued to study the topic on their own. I don’t know about you, but if I’m asked to answer some questions from a year ago, I may have forgotten some stuff. The idea that they had grown is really exciting.

There’s been a lot of emphasis on testing recently. How do your ideas fit with these requirements? Is there room for exploration?