Google expanding ‘Expeditions Pioneer Program’ to schools in 15 new cities

Students at Desert Hot Springs High School journeyed to Mt. Fuji, London, the Great Barrier Reef and the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland Monday as part of Google Expeditions, a virtual reality pilot program.

The program will be also expanding to Toronto in Canada, along with Denmark and Singapore, the blog post said.

New locations include Alexandria, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City and Washington DC.

The virtual trips are made possible with a special classroom kit that includes ASUS smartphones, Google Cardboard viewers to transform the phones into VR headsets, a tablet allowing the teacher to conduct the VR tours, and a router that lets Expeditions function without an Internet connection.

The Alphabet owned company has today announced that as of now more than 100,000 students have benefited from Google’s Expeditions program.

“We’ve been thrilled to see teachers use Expeditions to bring abstract concepts to life and provide students with a deeper understanding of the world beyond the classroom, infusing learning with excitement and fun”, Holland said in a statement.

Facebook’s (FB) social network continues to expand around the globe, with more than one billion daily users and rising, but the company also is expanding in new arenas such as virtual reality, Investor’s Business Daily reported.

The best thing is that the Expeditions Program offered by Google is free of all charges, getting to schools that couldn’t afford to offer this experience to their students. “Several are continuing lessons that developed from the field trip they experienced”.