Brown and White Vol. 132 no. 5

              The Brown and White Vol. 132 No. 5
Friday, February 17, 2017 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
LU-ALERT
Vincent Liu/B&W Staff
Lehigh graduate student Niloo Aflatooni reaches for jellyfish in Scott Garrigan’s virtual reality
study Feb. 8 in Iacocca Hall on Mountaintop Campus. The program used the HTC Vive VR
set, which utilizes two integrated sensors on opposite corners of a cubical space to create a
boundary in virtual reality.
Virtual reality initiative brings the world to the classroom
By AUSTIN KATZ
Assistant News Editor
The Lehigh community is exper-imenting
with the possibilities of
virtual reality in practical situa-tions.
A pilot study by the College of
Education is using virtual reality
headsets to improve the learning
of K-8 students. The children will
be asked to view images on their
headsets and communicate their
thoughts and feelings in response.
Professor Scott Garrigan and the
Centennial School lead teacher
Sara Heintzelman will test the chil-dren
over the course of a few days
to see if there’s a link between VR
and educational proficiency.
“VR is currently unknown ter-ritory,”
Garrigan said. “It is more
than a new medium. You must be
intensely involved, and there is so
much we don’t know.”
The proposed study can only
begin after getting approval from
Lehigh’s Office of Institutional
Research, but Garrigan said he
hopes to begin the study later this
spring.
“We have been looking at info on
screens for years,” Garrigan said.
“With VR, we aren’t looking at it,
we’re in it. The opportunity was
there, so it was the perfect envi-ronment
to find (Heintzelman) and
other people with VR expertise.”
VR came to Lehigh last year
through a partnership with the
United Nations to show what it’s
like to live in a Syrian refugee
camp. Bill Hunter, the director of
the Office of Fellowship Advising
and UN Programs, said there were
lines of people out the door to try
the headsets.
“For a period of five to six min-utes,
I was in a Syrian refugee
camp, and no matter where I
turned, something was happening,”
Hunter said. “When I took off the
headset, I said, ‘How can we bring
this to Lehigh? We need students to
experience this.’”
Hunter said VR is a particularly
helpful tool when learning about
global events because although it
is hard to replace the actual expe-rience,
if it is too dangerous to go,
this is the next best thing.
Students at Lehigh are also tak-ing
advantage of the possibilities
VR presents, though much closer
to home. Alex Spiezio, ’18, Asanté
Asiedu, ’17, and Nick Zambas, ’17,
See VIRTUAL Page 3
Kate Morrell/B&W Staff
A Lehigh University vehicle plows the roadways Feb. 9 by Sigma Phi Epsilon. Lehigh delayed classes Feb. 9.
By CATHERINE MANTHORP
Associate Sports Editor
At 5:39 p.m. Feb. 8, an
LU-ALERT informed campus
Lehigh would be closed until noon
the next day.
To the students who read this
message, it meant a snow day.
But to the staff deemed essential
— dining, transportation, facilities
and residential services staffs — it
meant work as usual.
Bruce Christine, the gener-al
manager of the dining man-agement
team, said he tries to
keep dining services and hours as
normal as possible despite snow-storms
that might cause universi-ty
closings or delays.
Christine said snowstorms are
an inconvenience that require a
lot of planning. But he said the
more snowstorms there are and
the more planning that goes into
them, the more efficiently the din-ing
team is able to operate.
Christine said the dining team
obtains extra food and disposable
food before possible closings or
delays because it never knows how
many inches of snow the storm
will bring or how classes will be
affected, if at all.
“It’s a lot of planning and late
minute changing because no two
storms have the same end result,”
Christine said.
See SNOW Page 4
Who is essential staff?