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Students Take Virtual Field Trips With 'Google Cardboard'

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Twin Cities kids are having the time of their lives this spring when it comes to field trips.

They are going places that school buses cannot take them, and they can thank Google Expeditions for that.

Kids are taking virtual reality tours all this month of famous places around the world using what is called a Google Cardboard.

Google is in the middle of a worldwide pilot program right now to help teachers get their students excited about learning.

Four teams of Google workers are in the Twin Cities all this month, demonstrating what an Android phone, a special app and cardboard pair of goggles can do.

Two classes at a time, second grade through sixth grade students at Oak Point Elementary School in Eden Prairie all had the same reaction to what they saw.

Allison Knopf is a fourth grade teacher who discovered the pilot program last summer and signed up online for her school.

"When they're looking through the viewfinder, as they turn it's … a spherical view, so they can turn in any direction. So as they turn, they're looking at different pieces," Knopf said. "And then the app allows the teacher to select a point, and then the kids will see arrows that kind of focus their attention on a specific place."

Google Cardboard Virtual Reality
(credit: CBS)

The student have been able to go underwater to see coral and fish around the globe, visit the Taj Mahal in India and the Mayan Ruins of Mexico -- and they even took a walk on the surface of the moon.

"Literally you feel like you're standing on the moon. You are Neil Armstrong's body looking at the shadow of yourself," Knopf said. "It's that immersive piece, that experiential piece that they have," she said.

Teachers say it enables students to visualize what they may be able to do for real one day.

"You are an explorer in the Himalayas. You are that person, and I think for kids as young as 7 years old, to start visualizing themselves in those roles and in those foot prints, that opens up doors that we probably can't even imagine at this point," she said.

To have a Google team come out to your school, you have to sign up online and then wait to hear back from them. There is no cost to the school. They started visiting schools last fall.

The folks at Oak Point say they signed up last summer and just learned two weeks ago they were getting a demonstration Tuesday.

After this testing phase at schools worldwide, Google will announce when and if schools will be able to purchase the materials.

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