Google’s virtual reality wows at Santa Rosa’s Comstock Middle School

They were traveling at Hilliard Comstock Middle School on Thursday, harnessing technology to move across time and through space.

“Eric from Google is going to take you on this particular tour of the Amazon. Please pay attention,” Sasha Oster told a classroom of students wearing cardboard goggles.

“Cool,” someone said.

“How about I take you underwater,” said Eric Subido, a Google Expeditions associate.

“Yeah!” a student exclaimed.

“Are we going to see dolphins?” another asked.

Soon students were tilting their heads this way and that, turning in circles, pointing wildly, plunging, virtually, beneath the surface of a mighty river.

The events of the day were built around a Google education initiative, Expeditions Pioneer Program, that the company rolled out in September in schools around the world. It is the latest thrust into education for Google, which is present in thousands of schools through its Google Apps for Education tools.

The technology at play Thursday that made the virtual reality experience possible was this: clunky cardboard goggles that contain a cellphone programmed with expeditions, and a tablet synced with the phone. The product is called Cardboard.

Teachers direct the experience with the tablet, indicating points of interest to students, who appear as small circles rushing to each point as they turn toward it, like fish to a fly.

“If you don’t do it right, you get kind of dizzy,” Giovanni Marquez, 12, observed.

Oster, the Santa Rosa school’s technology integration specialist, has laced the school with Google tools for use by students and teachers. She worked closely with the tech giant to bring the program to Comstock.

“Especially for students who don’t have the opportunity to travel and see many museums and historical sites, virtual reality gives them that experience of being immersed in another world, to feel it, to be wowed, to experience the magic of seeing and learning new things,” Oster said.

Eighteen classes took part in the daylong exercise, with about 200 students joining in.

“If you would have never been there, you could have been there. It was very fascinating,” said Bruce Campbell, 12, who toured the moon, the Amazon, Italy - billed as Romeo and Juliet’s Verona - and Mount Fuji, among other destinations.

As she walked the halls of her school with a visitor, Principal Laura Hendrickson noted history classes where students were experiencing colonial Philadelphia, an early college prep class where an airport and a pharmacy were the destinations and a science class where the ocean depths were being explored.

“It’s like ‘The Matrix,’?” she said, referring to the groundbreaking 1999 futuristic film.

As important, Hendrickson said, “It also integrates with the curriculum.”

Students reading a Japanese story experience Mount Fuji; others studying history go to Independence Hall. “It’s a way into the curriculum, and a way to create background knowledge,” she said.

Nereida Ramirez, 12, put down her goggles.

“It was a great experience to travel to places you’ve never gone or will never have the chance to go,” she said. “It made me want to go to Italy.”

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach him at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@jeremyhay.