With VR glasses on, students can go experience what it was like in the GDR
A UvA project by the Germany Institute Amsterdam (DIA) allows highschool students to experience the former GDR through VR glasses. This way, they learn about unfreedom, but also that you could have a good time in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), or East Germany, now part of the Federal Republic of Germany.
It is 1978 and you are at summer camp in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Somewhat lost, you walk around the camp, when you spot a pile of rubbish and decide not to clean it up. Before you know it, a voice, coming from your headset, admonishes you. This is not how we do things in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it says. Trash belongs in the bin! ‘Do you maybe want to hand in your medals again?’
Pretty soon, as a player, you realise that you had better keep in step in this game, because you are constantly being watched. This gives an uncanny feeling, especially with those VR glasses on, where you forget the real world around you completely for a moment. It makes playing this new Virtual Reality (VR) game quite an oppressive experience at times.
And that’s exactly the point. Indeed, the game - a collaborative project at the UvA by the Germany Institute Amsterdam (DIA), 4D Research lab and Stichting Autres Directions - aims to give high school students a better idea of what it was like to be young in the GDR. During German, social studies or history classes, they can put on VR glasses and then walk around a so-called pioneer camp - a children’s holiday camp where young people were allowed to go if they performed well at school and in the socialist system. In addition, students also meet real people in the game (they are projected as holograms), who used to live in the GDR and share their childhood experiences from that time with the player.
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Brainwashed
Then it also turns out that not everyone had it so bad in the GDR. Take Anne Hoffmann, for example, someone who had a pretty good time in the GDR, indeed, had a great time there as a child. Passionately, she talks in the play about how she felt part of something bigger, how she saw the West as the enemy and that at first she did not like the fall of the wall at all. Only later did she realise that she was ‘totally brainwashed’ by all the propaganda, she then tells in the game.
Such stories are a nice addition to school textbooks, where the GDR period is often portrayed ‘rather black and white’, says project leader Krijn Thijs on Monday evening during the presentation of the project in the Bushuis. Until recently, experts by experience, such as Hoffmann, mainly went to schools as guest speakers, as part of the project ‘Blik op de muur’ (also from the DIA). So with this new project, titled ‘Pioneering in the GDR’, these stories can now also reach pupils via a VR tool.
And that has two advantages, says Thijs. One: you can have students listen to several experts by experience in one session, which can broaden their perspective on the GDR considerably. Two: you are not dependent on whether a guest speaker can come to your school on a particular day. A disadvantage, however, is that you miss the interaction of a face-to-face discussion, Thijs acknowledges. This is the reason why the ‘Blik op de muur’ project is not completely abandoned and this new project is also called ‘Blik op de muur 2.0’.
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Headache and dizziness
The initial findings are good anyway, Pieter Mannak, teacher trainer at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, showed Monday evening in the Bushuis. He already put a similar VR tool to the test at a high school. According to him, the pupils there could completely immerse themselves in the virtual world, they could almost adopt the emotions of the people in the game. Although they also had some headaches and felt dizzy. However, it proved even more difficult for teachers. After all, how do you adjust a student when he or she is wearing VR glasses and you yourself cannot see what the other person can see? That is almost impossible.
Nevertheless, the added value of VR outweighs the challenges teachers have to overcome, Mannak concludes. In a few days, high school teachers will be able to experience this first-hand, when this VR tool will be available on the DIA site.
