Students Creating Virtual Worlds for Learning

The VR School Study launches a new research partnership with the The Association of Independent Schools of South Australia (AISSA) and 360° VR education company VRTY to explore how student content creation can develop the deeper learning skills of content mastery, collaboration, problem solving, communication, creativity and self-directed learning.

Partnering with nationally and internationally recognised expert Associate Professor Erica Southgate, University of Newcastle, teachers from Trinity College, Pembroke School and SEDA College SA are also co-researchers.

Each school will conduct a bespoke study over time based on the same research questions. This will build a cumulative evidence base on curriculum design and pedagogical choices for powerful learning through 360° VR across STEM-related subjects.

The beauty of the VRTY platform is that students do not need coding skills to create VR environments. This makes it accessible for all students to tell their learning story in VR sophisticated ways and, importantly, share this with others. With the buzz about a metaverse on the horizon, it will be important to empower students to actively engage as content creators of new digital content instead of them being situated as passive consumers. The use of an accessible type of VR for content creation in this project opens up the possibility for all students to have a stake in what is to come.

The VR School Study is unique in its approach to investigating — in all its practical, technical and pedagogical complexity — how VR can be embedded into real school classrooms to value-add to learning, with the project producing useful resources for teachers as well as scholarly insights. Discover more here.