[The Brookings Institution is a Washington, D.C. “nonprofit public policy organization” whose mission is “to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.” Below is the first part of an extensive new Brookings policy brief on the promise and peril of the application of presence-evoking technologies of the ‘metaverse’ in education. See the original, unabridged version on the Brookings website and/or download it in pdf format. –Matthew]
A whole new world: Education meets the metaverse
By Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jennifer M. Zosh, Helen Shwe Hadani, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kevin Clark, Chip Donohue, and Ellen Wartella
February 14, 2022
The metaverse is upon us. Soon it will be as omnipresent as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook (now Meta). As technology advances to bring us new immersive and imaginary worlds, how we educate children and prepare teachers must also advance to meet these new opportunities. When education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity. This is largely what happened with the introduction of “educational” apps designed to be used on smartphones and tablets meant for adults. Today, as the metaverse infrastructure is still under construction, researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers have a chance to lead the way rather than get caught in the undertow. To leverage the potential of the metaverse as a 3D, global, interconnected, immersive, and real-time online space, we need new ways to connect the physical world with augmented and virtual reality (VR) experiences.
In this policy brief, we offer a path for bringing best educational practices into the metaverse. We suggest a series of well-worn principles derived from the science of how and what children learn to guide the design of new educational technology. We also suggest ways in which design in this new space can go astray. In the end, we challenge those creating educational products for the metaverse to partner with educators and scientists to ensure that children experience real human social interaction as they navigate virtual spaces, children’s agency is supported as they explore these spaces, and there is a real eye to diversity in the representation and access to what is created.
A VISION
Imagine a circular classroom, surrounded by white boards and populated with movable chairs. Energized students are mesmerized by the tales of the Greek myths, the power of Zeus the god of the sky, and stories of the great Hercules—his son—whose strength was legendary.
Suddenly, a timeline is projected onto the middle of the floor. Children whisk away their chairs to stand in the present, ready to move backward and descend into the year 300 BC—a year in which they will encounter a new reality. They enter the metaverse of Greek culture. Carts buzz by them, traders in marketplaces surround them and high atop the hill, they see—with their own eyes—the temples of the gods and the people who worship them. They explore, they ask questions, they ponder, they learn!
The experience was designed to whet the appetite of the students, but questions remain: “How could we possibly know about the richness of Greek life? If we did not live there, how do we discover what was sold at the marketplace and which gods were all important?”
Then, the teacher positions each child on the timeline so that they return to the present. The walls around them turn to images of brown dust in which they see ruined old temples and pieces of columns dotted along the ground. Each child is now given a chance to become the archeologist, to use her avatar to find the answers to the question of how we construct the past while nested squarely in the present. The avatars are equipped with a shovel, a brush, and are given a plot to till. The teacher continues, “The society that you witnessed, like all societies of times past, became buried in the dirt. Each layer of dirt is like a story book that you can uncover and piece together.” The children move their avatars and begin to examine the dirt in a new way—in a careful and inquisitive way. Each finds shards of pottery and even partial faces of statues that once stood tall. After 20 minutes of working the soil, they show their discoveries to the others in the class. Opportunities for collaborative learning and co-creation are embedded into the virtual and real learning spaces they have built together.
Piecing their shards together as if they were solving a historical puzzle, they find an urn and a statue. They learn that the myths are more than stories—they were part of a bygone religion called paganism that real people practiced during time now buried beneath the earth’s surface. Archeologists like them helped to rediscover that society.
This deep, transferable learning that will last a lifetime comes to us by virtue of the metaverse delivered in a hybrid, guided play environment that could represent the school of the future. But notice that the interaction is inherently social with live people and live moment to moment, emotionally laden interactions. And notice that the teachers are still crucial to this experience. Make no mistake that the metaverse is coming. It is our job to specify how engagement in this always-on, virtual universe augments education rather than detracts from it and how it can preserve the key socially interactive qualities that are core to how humans learn.
DEFINING THE METAVERSE
Forbes Magazine offered varied definitions of the metaverse from tech leaders. Each speaks of a space that is a combination of virtual and live—creating a “third space,” as sociologist Ray Oldenburg noted, that is not home or work.
The metaverse of the future is likely to fully support augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the connectivity to link all worlds. Indeed, in its most democratic instantiation, anyone will have the opportunity to create a space and be part of a user-generated global community on an interoperable multiplatform where they can share their games or goods with the world. The G5 internet speed should allow this to be a reality.
To date there are a few better established instantiations of what is to come, including the games Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. Roblox, for example, offers a wealth of gaming opportunities and these games have attracted over 42 million active users, an increase of over 19 percent from 2019. And Roblox creators look to attract followers who will use and then heighten the visibility of any particular game.
A number of other examples highlight the power of the metaverse that is changing daily. Virbela offers virtual meeting and even wedding spaces. And Nike made news when it created Nikeland on Roblox. As VR platforms become easier to use and more interconnected, they will become better populated. Further, as VR accessories like VR goggles become less cumbersome, one can expect their use to be expanded and even adopted into educational settings. Thus, it is critical to think about how researchers can inform designers now so that forthcoming educational products and offerings in the metaverse are high quality and optimized.
LEARNING FROM WEB 2.0 AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ‘EDUCATIONAL APPS’
In 1997, the Nokia 6110 phone offered the first mobile app (of a game called Snake). In 2007, the app market took off in earnest after the introduction of the iPhone and even more so when iPads came into the marketplace in 2011. By 2015, when our research team first wrote a series of guiding principles for developing truly “educational apps,” the market was already flooded with more than 80,000 so called educational apps; the vast majority of these apps had no research behind their design or implementation that was linked to the science of how children learn. They were designed for platforms for adult use, not educational opportunities for children. Even now, designers use the term “educational” quite freely for products that many scientists think have only passing connection to anything educational.
In our article, we suggested four principles for creating a good educational app. The principles were drawn from consensus on the science of how children learn. We wrote that:
- Learning should be active, not passive, and that children learn best in environments that are “minds-on.” This means that a simple swipe did not count as an “active” move in an educational setting.
- The app should be engaging rather than distracting and only include bells and whistles that are integrated into the narrative of the game, lesson, or storyline. Many of the apps on the market interrupted the storyline with a chance to probe children’s vocabulary (e.g., “What else is red or starts with a B?”) and/or include persuasive ads that pop up to distract children to buy a different app.
- The app should tap into something meaningful for the child. There should be some point of connection that will allow children to relate the content of the app to what they know, rather than to start de novo in a foreign space.
- Finally, the app should encourage social interaction inside or outside of the app space, not just playing solo.
In 2018, the list of principles was expanded to include that learning should be iterative, such that an app would encourage children to achieve a learning goal through a number of different pathways or allow for a similar but slightly different experience on each encounter. Lastly, the experience should also be joyful, as children learn better when motivated through joy. Together, the principles of active, engaged, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and joyful coalesce in what we called “playful learning,” an umbrella term based in science that broadly incorporates how children learn through both free play and guided play.
However, the key to making these apps truly educational requires one additional step. Learning occurs best when the playful activity has a well-articulated learning goal, be it in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), literacy, or “learning to learn” skills like memory, attention, and flexible thinking.
By 2021, our team led by Marisa Meyer and Jenny Radesky reviewed the top downloaded educational apps from places like Google Play and Apple to see if the principles outlined above were becoming more prevalent in current educational apps available for children. Sadly, they were not. Of the highest downloaded paid apps for young children, 50 percent scored in the low-quality range, with only seven apps earning a score that put them in the highest quality category. Free apps scored even worse.
The bottom line is that developers of so-called educational apps and scientists who study how children learn are not communicating with one another, although the authors have tried to make this possible. Even accessible papers that are widely read do not change the trajectory. The lesson learned is that the 4-year gap between the time when apps became a dominant activity for young children and when the scientific community became engaged was too long. It allowed for a proliferation of low-quality materials that were rushed to market. The sheer number of available products also make it difficult—if not impossible—for parents and teachers to sift through the offerings to find truly educational products.
It is imperative at this moment, while the metaverse is being developed, that scientists, educators and developers co-construct engaging, immersive, and collaborative opportunities that are good for children and families. Understanding how to support learning goals through harnessing the power of active, engaging, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and joyful contexts will transform flashy and fun digital experiences into truly educational ones with true social interaction at their core. The experience with remote learning only underscored how important the social-emotional interaction is for children and how it needs to be built into the metaverse from the start.
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