Thanks for spending some time with us this afternoon.

I'm Ben Schrom.

I'm a product manager on the Google Expeditions team.

And I'm really excited to be joined here by Jen and Rob,

two of my colleagues.

We're really just a part, though,

of a small community of really, really passionate people

here at Google who think technology can really

change education.

And if it's not obvious already by virtue of the session,

we're especially excited about the role

VR can play in education.

So we've just returned, a little exhausted,

but super-encouraged, from a year-long trip

that we've taken.

And that trip has been to try to bring VR

to as many teachers and students around the world as we could.

And as Clay announced yesterday, we've

managed to bring expeditions to over a million students

since last year.

It's a number we're really, really proud of.

And it's been an amazing journey.

But so much of the credit for what follows actually

goes to the amazing group of teachers and students

who joined us along the way.

We've encountered so much enthusiasm.

We've received so much amazing feedback from them.

And we're really, really grateful to everyone

who has participated and who continues to participate.

So I'm going to start with some thoughts about why

VR and education are a really good match.

And then Jen's going to talk a little bit

about Google Expeditions and our Pioneer Program.

And then Rob's going to talk about the future of VR

in education as we see it.

So let's start with the why.

Like, why did we originally create Google Expeditions?

And why do we think VR platforms like Daydream

will offer so much potential for educators and learners?

Why should developers like yourselves

be interested in developing educational apps for VR?

So let's start with a quick show of hands.

How many of you remember studying really, really hard

for a test in school?

How many?

Most of you.

How many of you forgot everything

that you studied the second after the test?

Exactly the same number, right?

How many of you think you could do well in that test

again right now?

Not a lot.

[LAUGHTER]

So how many of you remember a trip

that you've taken to an interesting place, a country,

a museum, something like that?

About the same number.

How many of you can recall details about that trip?

A lot of you, right?

So therein lies one of the reasons

why we find the emergence of widely accessible VR technology

so exciting for education.

Google I/O is no place to temper one's enthusiasm.

So I'll make a bold claim that many of us who

think about educational technology, VR

is the thing we've been waiting for,

because it allows us to address one of the most important,

but neglected areas of learning.

And I want to spend a few minutes digging into why.

So to start with, let's take a really, really big step back.

Historically, most of the technology

that we've developed to aid learning

has been aimed to enable access to information--

facts, details, other observations about the world.

And for most of human history, a smart person

has basically been someone who knew a lot of facts.

And fact retention is what a lot of the technology that we've

built directly supports.

I'm talking about things like the book, right?

Or libraries of books, a catalog that lets you easily

access tons and tons of information quickly.

Search engines, like one you might recognize here,

have only served to make this kind of fact retrieval

breathtakingly fast, comprehensive, and easy.

Even the rapid growth of technology like laptops,

and tablets, and smartphones in schools

has only really served to help you assimilate information

and then turn around and evaluate

how well you did in absorbing it and recalling it.

But while information is super, super important,

it's not even close to the full story

when it comes to learning.

Let me give you one example of this.

Here is a math problem.

"There are 26 goats and 10 sheep on a boat.

How old is the captain of the boat?"

So a study done in the US to a bunch

of fifth graders in the '90s asked this question.

And three-fourths of those students

produced a numerical answer to this question.

The most common answer was 36.

There were some 16s.

And amazingly, there was one 260.

[LAUGHTER]

A quote from one of the students who answered 36 said, "Well,

for this type of problem, you need to add, or subtract,

or multiply.

And for this one, it seemed it was best to add."

[LAUGHTER]

Right?

And the important point, these kids are not stupid at all.

These are smart kids.

But they're kids for whom the traditional approaches

to teaching mathematics are failing.

Let me give you one little bit more complicated example.

A study done in the '90s found that when students were taught

geography in a traditional way by memorizing all the states

and where they go and the state capitals with a worksheet

like this, they were largely incapable of naming or placing

those same states in the correct places

when the borders were removed like that.

They were basically clueless the second the map changed.

But the study found that another group of students

who had spent some time discussing concepts

like why rivers and mountain ranges are natural

borders-- they were much more capable of placing states

in the right spots.

And the reason that's important is that simple techniques

that literally, in this case, ground information about which

states are where serve students to understand

the important concepts of why-- like,

why are the borders where they are.

And learning this way is powerful,

because it allows for much more improved knowledge transfer.

It allows you to apply the same thing you learned there

somewhere else.

So you could logically apply these same lessons

to a map of Europe or whatever.

Let me give you another very different example.

We've long known that we have really, really

powerful and innate spatial memories,

even if we didn't understand the mechanisms.

This is the reason why most of you guys can remember the trips

and none of us can remember the test.

And here's actually a medieval representation

of the brain that tried to understand it

as actually a series of spaces where

you crammed memories and facts, like an attic or something.

They actually weren't that far off.

It's the same insight that has given rise

to that mnemonic device called a memory palace,

or a mind palace.

For those of you who don't know what that is,

it basically involves using our memory

of a place, or better spatial memory, the rooms

in a familiar building like your house or your street,

as a structure in which to place the arbitrary facts that you

remember, say, in this picture, like a large number

of amphibious species.

So each thing that you want to remember

gets associated with the physical space

that you already know.

And then when you want to recall them,

you visualize that space you know.

And you use them as a trigger for that set of arbitrary

facts.

And we've known that this works for a long time.

Cicero used it to remember long, long speeches.

But it's a capability that traditional academics

rarely, rarely tap.

It's one that's easy to see VR making use of them.

It's only recently that we've really

begun to understand why this works that way,

at least scientifically.

The last 30 or so years have seen a revolution

in the study of cognition, and especially

in the study of the science of learning.

For one, we understand that learning actually

changes the physiology of the brain.

And we can actually look for that

when we're studying learning.

We also know-- we have scientific evidence

that being smart is not about being informed.

For instance, studies have shown that very young children

with very little information quickly

understand fundamental concepts of numbers, physics, and logic.

And they can learn these really quickly.

So it turns out that kids like my 8-month-old

are in fact very smart, very ignorant little experts

in learning.

And this one remains a novice in sleeping.

And now that we have all supercomputers in our pockets,

the notion of smartness really needs to change, right?

Because being smart isn't about being

able to repeat and remember information.

Technology does an amazing job of doing that for us.

Being smart is being able to effectively use information

and locate it within concepts.

So as Herbert Simon says here, the new smart

is being able to sort out what's deserving of our attention.

And given that most of us have jobs today that didn't even

exist when we were born, the ability to learn

is more important than ever.

OK, I'm sure you're all surprised that I'm not

a cognitive scientist given my 30 second recap of 30

years of nuanced study.

But the thing that I'm excited to take away from this

is that it confirms what great educators have long

known-- that the days that people learn best,

that the teachers who inspire their students the best,

that the days when school is the most effective

are the ones that put learners in the position

to discover for themselves, to organize

those facts into concepts, to turn misconceptions

into metacognition, or these moments where you're

aware of your own learning and you can actually

think and reflect on it.

And even if we haven't had the science

to prove it until recently, we've

known about this for a really, really long time.

It almost seems trite when you read it,

but Aristotle is actually being sort of profoundly insightful

when he claims that we learn by doing things.

It's all the more profound when you go into schools,

and you see how little learning actually happens by doing.

Even more contemporary people like one

of the great thinkers of pedagogy, John Dewey,

was telling us 100 years ago that if we

want to foster learning, we have to give students something

to do, not something to learn.

And this is when ed tech was like books on a chalkboard,

right?

One of our most influential current thinkers

about educational technology, Seymour Papert-- he

was the guy that created the first programming

language for kids-- noted that teachers

should concern themselves with creating

the conditions for learning rather than providing

information.

And that's one of the reasons why

he was so passionate about the freedom of expression kids

get by learning how to write software.

But even though we've long had these intuitions,

we've had experts telling us this,

and now we have science confirming this,

we don't really have the technology to scale this stuff.

Think about it.