✥How is Corning Gorilla Glass impacting the education market and collaborative learning?
Corning Gorilla Glass is penetrating the education market for applications such an interactive whiteboards (IWBs) and dry-erase passive markerboards. The thinness of Gorilla Glass with its superior durability makes it a viable solution for both applications. Gorilla Glass can enhance the functionality of education products by improving touch sensitivity of IWBs or working as a stain-resistant surface for markerboards. Functionality must be fluid in the classroom setting so students remain focused on the curriculum.
✥What success has Corning Gorilla Glass experienced in the dry-erase whiteboard market?
Corning and Egan Visual first showcased a product manufactured by Egan that featured Corning Gorilla Glass at InfoComm 2013. Since then, two additional companies – Krystal Glass White Boards and MooreCo Inc. – have announced product lines that also feature Gorilla Glass as the cover solution. The education market opportunity is still relatively new to Corning and we are currently working with other customers that are anxious to feature lightweight, durable Gorilla Glass in their product lines as well. This is a wonderful example of how highly-engineered glass can deliver extraordinary benefits to everyday products.
✥Do you think functionality of displays in classrooms, such as interactive whiteboards, is essential to a student’s ability to understand and retain information?
Absolutely! Think about the frustration you feel when you’re interacting with a bank ATM through a thick piece of soda-lime glass and the numerical buttons do not register so you have to press harder and harder. Your focus quickly shifts from task completion to frustration about the functionality, or lack thereof, of the display. It is a similar experience for students in a classroom setting. If the task is to identify the stages of photosynthesis by dragging and dropping the stage identifiers onto a photo and the user cannot get the identifiers to register due to a thick piece of soda-lime hindering the experience, user frustration will quickly set in and shift the focus off of the lesson and onto the functionality of the device. Functionality should be fluid so the user feels as though interaction with the device is effortless.
✥What does Corning envision for classrooms in the future?
In 2012 Corning released a video, ‘A Day Made of Glass 2’, available on the Corning Incorporated YouTube channel, which illustrates concepts for the classroom of the future. The classroom features an array of Corning’s Advanced Glass Technologies such as thin and durable Gorilla Glass for a large-format, bezel-less interactive whiteboard. The IWB in the vision is no longer projector based, but an all-in-one LCD that is seamlessly integrated into the classroom setting. The students also have conformable displays such as slates on their desks that could feature a product such as Corning Willow Glass that can be manufactured at thicknesses less than 200 microns.
The overall vision illustrates Corning Advanced Glass Technologies as the portal between students and the touch interface enabling interaction and communication effortlessly streamlined into multiple ubiquitous displays in the classroom setting. That’s the future we are working towards.
