New Realities for Kids: A Guide for Virtual Reality in Classrooms and at Home

Project Description:

Our client, Wishplay has been expertly administering joyful virtual reality experiences since 2017. Wishplay began with founder David Parker volunteering in hospitals to grant last wishes in virtual reality to palliative patients. More recently, Wishplay started bringing VR to classrooms, using immersive nature videos to help children with varying needs regulate their emotions and feel safe and calm. It did not take long to uncover the immense potential for VR to promote mindfulness and offer a secure place for children to access their emotions. Wishplay wanted to make VR and the joys and mindfulness benefits it brings accessible to as many people as possible.

Our team conducted semi-structured interviews with parents and educators at a western Quebec elementary school to gather valuable qualitative data regarding VR-use with children in the classroom and at home. We collaborated with Wishplay and subject-matter experts and conducted a thorough research review in order to identify what information would be valuable for educators and parents looking to start using VR with their children for emotional regulation and mindfulness.

We gathered these insights and knowledge into a quick start guide and comprehensive playbook to be used when administering VR to children. The quick start guide was designed to get educators and parents with a range of technological abilities up and running with the Oculus as quickly and smoothly as possible. Using the full playbook, educators and parents are able to learn the fundamentals of VR, understand the benefits to mindfulness and learning, and gain the confidence to administer it to children.

Over the course of the project, our team learned many important lessons. Through our interviews and research, we learned about the therapeutic benefits of VR as well as safety and ethical concerns when it comes to using headsets with children. We learned about the importance of asking the right questions—those that would help us best understand the needs, joys, and frustrations of our target audience and design a guide that would address those needs and be of most use to them.

Using collaborative virtual tools like Miro, Google Drive, Zoom, and Slack, we learned to effectively carry out design work in an online environment. We learned that good communication is key to effective collaboration in a virtual co-design process.

From an operations perspective, we learned to be flexible and agile in our workflow. Creating a guide to working with established hardware meant we had to test and revise often to ensure our instructions and methods reflected the latest software and hardware changes at all times. It also prescribed that the final deliverable be a living document, one that would be easy to update in future iterations.

Above all, we learned about the importance of keeping accessibility and joy as the central tenants of this project. We are extremely grateful to the parents, educators, and subject-matter experts for their time and contributions to this project.

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