Welcome to Season Seven of Edtech insiders, the show where we cover the education technology industry in depth every week and speak to thought leaders, founders, investors and operators in the Ed Tech field. I'm Alex Sarlin.
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Märt Lume is the co founder of Futuclass, a company building curriculum aligned virtual reality games to enrich Natural Science Education for secondary school students. With a 15 year journey across Vancouver, Denver, law Aviv, Berlin and Tallinn Estonia. Märt has designed gaming enterprise and educational software. Notably in Vancouver, he was the first employee of the glitch game which eventually pivoted to
become known as slack. A pivotal moment in 2017 introduced mark to VR, sparking the realization that immersive technologies coupled with learning via layered game mechanics hold a key to transformative human learning experience. This revolution fueled the inception of future class which now elevates chemistry and physics classes in over 10% of Estonian schools, earning and praise from students and educators alike.
future classes expanded its offerings into the comprehensive Futuclass school kit, which equips schools with hardware software, teacher onboarding, mentoring and best practices, igniting students with excitement for learning through VR. future classes also launching partner apps integrating VR lessons into subjects like art design, social studies, music and physical
education. Märt's recognition includes the Friend of Education 2022 title that Estonia's esteemed teachers Gala, acknowledging his contributions to numerous edtech startups and initiatives. He's also an advisor and angel investor to more than 20 companies at the moment with a focus on edtech and xr Märt Lume Welcome to Edtech Insiders.
Hello, great to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you you are coming in from the Estonian edtech world, which is I've heard great things about but I've never talked to anybody in it. Give us a little bit of an introduction to how you got into ed tech in the first place and what you're doing with future class.
Gladly. So I Yes, I'm from Estonia, I to northeast in Europe, we're kind of close to Finland culturally. And I guess nowadays also, increasingly many ways. I went to Canada to study game design in my early 20s. I was already 20 years ago. And so first part of my career I made my dreams come true in that I spent almost 10 years in Vancouver, part of my passion was also incidentally, building and designing educational games.
And then that career evolved, actually work without going into too much detail, or we can later if you'd like, but I worked on a game called glitch, which was like a massively multiplayer online game. It was like
building culture. It's kind of like Running Man online, if you if you know what that creativity festival is, like, after that kind of game speak for me, because this transformational experiences that I was looking for in games, they, as the platforms moved to mobile, and the gamers as well, in many ways, and the major growth was there. I sort of thought that my time in games for entertainment
is done. And then I spent some time three, four years working, building serious enterprise software for making group decisions and couple other small companies. And then 2017, I discovered virtual reality. And that's when I realized that how this stuff had been really kind of unconsciously or not gearing towards in life is really coming together. So game based learning, learning through mechanics actually doing stuff, paired with immersive technologies, where you are
really in the world. And it's really difficult to build great interactive experiences, and just a lot of iteration polish, like it's not as straightforward, but it's really it's clearly the most powerful way I think to achieve kind of human learning and different you can basically create you know realities and have other people experience them and change them. I. So it's a very roundabout answer, but kind of a guide to education more seriously since
2017. And future class itself itself was incepted in 2019, when I returned to Estonia, and basically I met the team, in a way, I had this dream to make like a virtual reality learning company. And I met the guys who are running the leading Virtual Reality arcades in Estonia. And they had started building apps on their end, just because they saw, you know, 1000s of kids coming in and just not getting enough of pouring coffee into the printer and Job Simulator just like doing stuff in virtual
reality. And they were thinking like, why why couldn't we do something useful? You know, we don't. So when we got together, they already had the first prototype in electromagnetism module in physics. And I had the game design background, and also some funding as I actually that glitch MMO. I mentioned before that became slack. First employee of slack in a way, which is much love story, beloved story as well, we can go into that if you like. But yeah,
so education. To me, it's like, if you look at virtual reality, now, I'm also the head of Estonia and VRA, our association, which I didn't mention. So I really see like beyond besides entertainment, like learning and training is what we are is for basically, so amazing, powerful things to be achieved in this medium, I think, of course, AR as well. And we can talk about that later how that is coming. But I think we are already here now. So focusing on that is a really good thing to do now.
Yeah. It's interesting to hear you talk about your, about your journey. I was Yeah, I was definitely going to ask you about how glitch was famous for being a game that the company slack was a game company before it was a social collaboration. I don't know what a good discussion platform and the discussion piece became the company. It's it is like a famous tech story.
But it's interesting to hear that you're also taking your experience in educational gaming and game design, combining it with this really exciting new medium that, as you said, is not usually being used for education. Some people are trying that, but and then putting it all together, basically a service of science. So you're doing chemistry and physics, right?
Yeah. And maybe you want to know why we chose science? Or what's the kind of natural inclination. I mean, basically, whenever you build the game environment, science is great for many reasons. In a more holistic sense, the success in math and natural sciences is correlated kind of success in school. And in life, we'll have the exact studies, but I hope you heard something similar. And then science is pretty universal as well, right? Physics works
the same in every country. And when you think about building actual systems, kind of a sandbox, where students can learn in different scenarios, then definitely doing it in a kind of science, basically, you know, it has true or false, there is no like middle ground, no human opinion, like no kind of vagueness to it, it's just the most suitable, I think in almost every every respect, and building big elaborate, you know, set pieces from history and so on, are a lot more
complicated, because you come up against first of all, it costs a lot, at least until generative AI can rate like scenes, it's gonna cost a lot. And it's also very much subject to human interpretation, right? That was, I mean, I guess how things looked like you can you can kind of objectively state more or less in Egypt or Rome or whatever, but maybe like, some historic events, I definitely can see your history books quite may differ quite a bit right in
different countries. So yeah, so I think science is like the low hanging fruit definitely do apply VR to.
And you know, one of the aspects of it, that is obviously really conducive to VR, as you mentioned, is the sort of immersive nature of it. So I'm looking at, you know, the chemical bond module that you have, and I remember the chemical bonds in school, the covalent bonds and the things that but you know, they share electrons. And when you talk about it, or you draw it on a blackboard, it sort of begins to click, it's a little bit
strange. But in your world, you're actually manipulating actual molecules, moving them around seeing how the bonds go, how the electrons go from place to place, it is so much more visceral, and just makes so much more sense when you actually can literally put your hands on it.
Yeah, definitely. And maybe also tying to the previous question, we're approaching kind of the first experiences that students like young students, you know, seventh, eighth, ninth grade, so we live under 13 have with the natural sciences. So it's important that the first experience is positive, very engaging. So the chance that they get excited about you know, chemistry is not the very beloved subject in general in school. Again, I don't have the exact data, but it's, it's not
the top picture. So having this kind of excitement and start from the subject that to make it like interesting and understandable for people is very rewarding.
We talked a while back to Justin Weinberg, who has a has a company called active learning, and it's also chemistry focused. And he mentioned something really interesting that I think is very relevant to what you're doing with future classes as well, which is that chemistry is a subject that a lot of people struggle with. There's a lot of abstraction. There's a lot of math in it at times, but and it's so physical, but people don't not only do Students don't
always get it. But there aren't very many dedicated ed tech platforms that really put in the time and energy to actually do it right and your atoms start is just so cool, you know, looking at your atom structure module, and it's like, you're shooting neutrons and electrons and seeing them connected and seeing what Adams you're creating, you have the periodic table in front of you as like a dashboard, it's so neat to be able to lean into a subject like that, sort of
jump into it with both feet need for an edtech company to do it. And really, I'm sure very, very cool for a student tell us about that focus on chemistry and physics, specifically, instead of sort of broadly thinking just like stem and then making things that are much more generic. Yeah, I
mean, you have to definitely kind of start specifically, from the kind of granular level like what, maybe explain a bit how the process works. So we look at the whole curriculum, then we, it's based in Estonia, but I think it applies globally quite well. That's also why we pick science because selling something for Estonian market, we're in 10% of the schools here. But it's not enough to break even for a company like that. Our ambition is definitely global. And we already we can talk about that
later. But we can also we have some clients in different countries abroad, let me talk about perhaps the process of how we create these modules, we query a whole group of teachers, probably about 50, or 100, which is reasonable size in Estonia, the most kind of progressive, and they identify the most difficult to teach subjects or concepts in both chemistry and physics, then we have a big list, then we sort them, and we basically take it from the top.
So it's like redox reactions, or what have you, and break down the curriculum, what are the learning goals of each kind of lesson. And then we think how we can make these learning goals, how we can teach them through, basically game and mechanics. And this involves quite a bit of prototyping, testing, a lot of back and forth first with teachers, then we students, everything is like tested many, many times in front of a group. And we really make sure that students get it, most of the
students get it. It's a very interesting process. It's quite laborious, but I think their result is worth it. When we think it's not like, you know, cut and paste that we look at the school book and put it in VR as like a scene. It's like a whole process of making the interactions and creating it kind of from scratch and innocence.
Yeah. And you're measuring the outcomes, which is really important. I mean, so you've been tell us about the outcomes that you've seen for students when they actually are using future class versus things like textbooks?
Yeah. So on our website, there's several blocks going into more detail. But basically, we, we've had a number of tests where we have the regular class be taught just using the regular way. And then we had the VR one. And we basically match the students performance, we check the knowledge before and after in both cases, and then we measure
the gain. And the numbers brought up on website, you know, their sound, big, 68 75% different subjects, I wouldn't say it's like representative of globally that if we applied this lesson to anybody in the world, they will improve that much. But the gain is definitely significant. Another thing that is interesting is that retention is big, is good, because my students actually do stuff they
remember a lot more. So in two weeks, which is the standard kind of test whether you remember or not something, if you've done it actually versus just reading or hearing about it, the chances are a lot bigger that you do remember, and also the engagement in general, like there is also we asked did this make you more excited about chemistry or about this particular topic? And people who use V are very overwhelmingly
saying that yes, yeah. So yeah, there's that all the other aspects of being more cost effective, and so on, which I think are quite obvious when you think about it.
Right. So bigger learning gains, compared to textbooks, better retention, two weeks later, people are more engaged and more focused, and it can be much more cost effective. I always really get excited. I mean, obviously, we're big edtech advocates on this show.
But it's always really nice to hear when a technology solution can sort of hit multiple different, really important metrics in a classroom, you know, sometimes we see things that are much more engaging, because they're gamified, or because they're fun, but they don't always even measure the learning outcomes. Because sometimes those tools are sort of designed for engagement designed just to keep people
interested. When you can combine engagement and learning outcomes and retention of material, you're onto something really, really exciting. And then you align it to curriculum. So tell us about what sets these immersive hands on experiences apart from traditional classroom methods, and how you plan to continue to build out curriculum aligned lessons.
Yeah, so we look at the whole year. So basically, there should be, we can put everything in VR and I don't think we should. And there's another whole topic that we can that we can go into. We also have like a home version of future class, and you have to polish the home version a lot more. And you basically have to replace the teacher with that like extra content, feedback, hints, all these things, giving information where teacher wouldn't be there or other
students. So we're trying to build so that every block of content would have something in VR, like, it's kind of we're gonna treat it as a field trip or as like a group exercise that really, like injects the students with enthusiasm. Yeah. So we kind of building it out, starting from the eighth to ninth grade and chemistry, we basically have completed that now. And we're now focusing on
physics more. And the idea is to kind of go in high school then and tackle biology next as well, on the kind of first classes level. Yeah, I don't know if I can share much more right now. But there's also I mean, there are many things on the roadmap that are looking interesting. We just have to prioritize. There's the online use cases for teaching. Yeah, there's a lot of things. There's mixed reality stuff. There is. Yeah. roadmap is a whole different conversation. Yeah, good luck.
But basically, we're trying to spread out the subject so that there would be some VR content in every kind of part of the year.
So one thing that is interesting about what I'm hearing you say, you know, we've talked to a handful of other VR education companies, we've talked to dreamscape learn, we've talked to prisms, VR Praxis Labs, which just sort of diversity training for corporations in VR, transfer VR. And one of the things that I think is coming up again, and again, is, you just mentioned that these almost feel like
field trips. It's like an experience where people are actually going into this and doing these immersive experiences in a particular, you know, timeframe surrounded by wraparound supports that might be a teacher or additional software or hints in the actual experience. But I think when this stuff first took off, there was this narrative of like Metaverse, everybody will be in these things all day, your entire education will happen in
the metaverse. And I think all the companies that are doing VR, and really looking at how it works are increasingly saying, it's not about all day, it's definitely not about all day, it's a special moment. It's a moment where you go in and do this thing that's incredibly memorable and sort of transformative and motivating. And then you come back out with a class. Tell us a little bit
about that approach. I mean, for one thing, how do the kids react to these sort of special experiences where they get to go into VR and do something they've never done before?
Yeah, you touched on many good points here. In general, virtual reality is kind of like the highest fidelity experience you can have, right? And you just want don't want that all the time. You know, when you're considering, let's say, working, or anything like there are some things you want to do really close very intensely with other people a lot of information exchange, high bandwidth communication, then other times you want to
focus. Other times you want to like wash dishes, and you know, listen to something when you're just downloading information, kind of we're walking or whatever. So in the classroom, we actually have a kind of a mixed modality setup as well. So we have lesson plans. And we have lesson plans for shared devices. So in most classrooms, let's say you have 30 students, and you have like 11, Oculus quests or whatever, because you basically have a group when you make groups like three for two
students. And we have the lesson plans accommodate for that. So you have worksheets that when one student is in VR, then they either collaborating filling stuff out or independently, and they go back and forth. So there's like every, every module has like a kind of a different setup, how both can learn and stay engaged at the same time are all the students in a group? So this is mixed modality. But even if you had the headsets, everybody had one, I don't think
it makes sense. It's a bit like when you go to work, and you basically are in the same room with everybody all the time talking or something like it just, it's too intense, I think there is the way you learned should have been, you know, in cycles. And then we are it's just one part of the cycle. It's not doing maybe I'm like
rambling a bit. But here the I definitely don't see how it could work all the time, either from the human cognition perspective, that there's just too much it's too intense, being in a different reality for that long, is not beneficial. And a lot of the thinking and this reflection that needs to happen does not really you don't need to be in VR for that at all.
Right? I mean, that's it's a very thoughtful approach. And I think I think it's something that educators are continuing to sort of evolve and learn how to use these types of modern technologies in a way that enhances learning but doesn't take over or become impossible. And there's the logistics, you know, I know that you actually have these like Future Class kits of headsets that can be used in classrooms. And it's designed for exactly for this model, where it's group
based. Tell us about the kits and how you get headsets into classrooms.
Yes, so basically, over this three plus years that we've been selling to secondary schools in Europe and beyond, we've come away with a few realizations. So schools in general, often they get funded by grants and they just want to pay once and they want everything taken care of. We started by offering our own case. So just to be clear, we don't produce the kids because we use the kind of the most modern, six degrees of freedom in our quest, because consumer grade virtual reality devices.
So those are, you can't really develop them yourself. You need like billions of dollars to be like maybe in five years or something, you can reasonably create your own ecosystem around them, but currently not. Yeah, so we've built there on case we obviously know all the accessories, all the things you need, like face wipes, and accessories and all kinds of things, you need to run a lesson and do it with like many students, and how to charge the
devices. And there's, it also has to do with it's also changing game a little bit. So used to be a little bit more difficult due to different ways how the device is updated, or what count systems, they were on them. So it's gotten a lot easier over the years. Also, there are management solutions now, like Arbor and manage XR, which basically let you deploy and manage the fleet of devices from one central point quite
easily and even share. Now you can even share your builds, how to put it you can share your APK file, which is basically the installer file with anybody in the world who is using this mobile device management solution. So complicated way to
say it. But basically, what this means for photo glass is that we have partner apps now that cover almost all the subjects because the problem was content for many years, and probably still is with VR education, you just don't have really great apps to offer to kids in all the different classes to justify the school to buy this quite expensive lead right devices.
And nowadays, you can end up referred to law school get this we have basically covering apps, besides our own chemistry, physics also like art and music and language learning and, and makes it a lot more enticing of a proposal for school.
I think that's a lesson that we are still learning in the US as well. You know, we talked about a year and a half ago now to one of the heads of the meta Education Initiative, which is, you know, as you say, the people who have the billions of dollars to
actually make these systems. And they've been wrestling with exactly the question that you guys have already sort of really made some moves on, which is how to put enough content that's curriculum aligned enough to that, that it's truly worth it for a school to buy these relatively expensive equipment compared to other types of equipment like Chromebooks, you can't do it, if you're only going to do one lesson or a few lessons, you need multiple subjects, you need multiple
lessons for each subject, you need to be able to talk about the alignment. And it sounds like in the years that you've been doing this in Estonia, you've realized that and begin to basically you're offering a entire VR solution, not only the powerful chemistry and physics immersive that are part of future class, it's the you get the whole headset, that you get the headsets preloaded with all of these different educational apps. Very, very clever. And I have not yet heard of anybody
doing that here. But they should be because it's obviously
we do have partners also in the US. So we wouldn't be shipping your case across the Atlantic, that wouldn't make any sense. I hope it's the new kind of normal now. Because it really brings things to a different level, there are these kind of moments where I think things evolve. Yep, at some point, we'll probably get rid of the controllers, and they're going
to be hand tracking. So that will be a whole new level again, because there's nowadays a lot of a lot of young people are like gamers, so they're super cool with it. But then again, not everybody is and then even though it's quite easy to use the remotes and you get it in like some minutes, if you practice a little bit or just try it, it's still it'll be a lot easier. It'd be just hand tracking and pressing buttons and just kind of like the Apple vision pro basically, style
navigation. So yeah, moments like this that are coming few years. And that will make VR AR more mainstream. So this hopefully for schools is one of these kind of paradigm shifts now. Yeah,
I'm hearing a couple of lessons that you've learned in your years getting into Estonian schools testing with teachers finding out what they need. One is this sort of, as you mentioned, the all in one solution so that if school has a grant it they can get, you know, everything they need within VR with one purchase, that it has lots of views that covers a lot of subjects. What are some of the other things you have
learned? You've obviously been through many cycles of this year and 10% of the schools in the entire country? What are some of the other things you've learned being in these classrooms talking to people about how VR is used?
Yeah, so I think the bigger one in the early days already was that the rowdy kids and the kids who have any kind of attention challenges, let's say they are doing really, really well in VR, so they get super engaged or, or even in VR, if you like, lose your focus for a second. You're in a purpose designed environment. So you're very quickly getting back to the
task. So you maybe look around for a bit of haha, and then again, you're added so compared to the real world with basically you might never go back to the actual task. It's, it's a real differentiator. Then the shaky It's this isolation. Also, our system is built so that you actually include the Glass app. If you're a teacher, you can make it so that you can see where the kids are at, you don't see what they're doing exactly, even though that's coming soon
as well. But you can see kind of their progress, you can see who's struggling, and you can kind of go to them and help them individually. But the shy kids are basically because nobody else that's kind of the performance anxiety is gone a bit because you're in your own world, like focused, while at the same time, you know, you can communicate with your peers, and so on. So that's a good one in general, like this kind of freedom to fail and experiment. And this just makes kids you
know, playful. And really, I think it's been a very big part of the engagement. Yeah, I think group work has been surprised for us in the big scheme. Like we didn't think that sharing devices and kind of designing this multimodal experience would be the way to go for schools, but it really isn't really works yet. I mean, technology skills, getting people moving. And it's
pretty good. Yeah, so there's one question is at some classes, so you can do the lesson either sitting in a chair, or you can do it kind of freeform moving around a bit, like all our modules are designed so that you're kind of small station. So you don't really need like too much space, you can basically do it in a chair. But it's kind of a bit better if you have a bit
of freedom to move. So maybe just I guess it's like a design affordances that we've definitely learned over time as well how to like, be good for any kind of player in any kind of habits, or
you mentioned this sort of visibility aspect to it that when kids are in VR, even if it's one kid in a group in a classroom, the instructor doesn't always really know what's happening in there. And that's okay, to some extent. But as different kinds of VR experiences continue to evolve. It's something that I'm sure teachers would want. You mentioned that already, they have some insight, but you think it's coming that they can really actually see what students are seeing. Can you tell us a little
bit more about that? Yeah,
it's basically a technical problem sort of getting in, it's kind of been happening, so that you can do it with a few headsets, kind of reliably with a good Wi Fi, but it's a problem, the technical issue, the easier way is just to send like text updates, how far someone is in your module, I think you can also have teachers be able to like send different messages back to students who can then read them in VR, stuff like that. That way, you can
also work remotely, right? Yeah. So there's like technical things with that, I think that are really going to improve it in the next few years.
The remote is a really interesting use case. I can imagine. I mean, the idea of using VR headsets in a online class with a you know, remote instructor is really interesting, I've never really even thought about that. I think
that happens a lot during pandemic, actually, the environments are, what they can be, which can be in some sense quite play nowadays, when you compare it to like a modern or, you know, online game environment. But even just the feeling of being there, like if you ever experienced that, it's
surprisingly powerful. Even if you have really basic avatars, when you're hear the voice, you see where the where it's coming from it's spatial audio, and you have the eyes and the hands and all this put together it really like you can have a group meeting with people like you know, not cutting each other without you really cannot have on Zoom. That's been, I think, well established. And it really translates into kind of an online environment interactions really well as well.
I mean, I remember doing the first time doing that the sort of Job Simulator game that you mentioned earlier in an Oculus, and it is, really, and that's not a collaborative game, but it is a game with sort of workstations, and where you can do many different kinds of things within one context. And I totally agree with you, it's so interesting, because it doesn't yet feel like you're inside a
triple A video game, right? It feels like it's a little bit more blocky, it's a little bit more coming along in terms of the graphics, but because it's so immersive that responds to you, it's incredibly quick to figure out, you know, what do I have to do? What are the different things I can do? What are my affordances, you can sort of make sense of the environment really quickly. And it's very engaging. It's a really, it's an
interesting technology. And I think one of the things that's obviously come up over the last year is that VR is sort of finding its place in the educational world. And you know, it's very powerful, but it's finding, I think, the metaverse narrative sort of threw it for a little bit of a loop. And then of course, recently, we see AI, everybody's talking about AI. But I've been surprised at how little I've heard anybody actually talk about a vision for how AI and VR can really work
together. It seems like they can work together in a lot of different ways. Can you tell us about what you're thinking about about how AI can enhance VR experiences?
For sure. Of course, I think for anyone in tech field, that's a great topic to ponder on. So I think the reason why Metaverse hasn't been that related in discussion is yet is because 3d models creation and 3d kind of world creation is quite not there yet. But people basically expect it in a year or so. They're really really big, like creating 3d content is a huge bottleneck for basically online worlds. And probably doing it really well. I'll still need humans to kind of direct
the AI for a while. But it's a big, big deal. If you can just create the whole scene, you know, by the prompt, basically, I think when that is coming, the kind of the online spaces are going to really blow up. And it's going to be amazing just to be in you know, it's like you're in paintings or anything that you're can conjure up in your fantasy can now be a place you
can go to. So currently, we've also played around, and we've kind of made this, like in a game civilization of this thing called simulate beta, basically take your Wikipedia of sorts. So you can you know, you're studying, I don't know, atomic structure, and then you basically ask any question about that. Obviously, the AI would know where you are in the game. What's kind of the context where the guardrails are, it says something stuff that makes sense. And that's useful to you.
So that part I think, is currently happening. Also the, I'm sure you've seen, like, there's lots of videos online, right? with Khan Academy or whatever, like talking about their conmigo that you don't want to give the whole answer away, you want to kind of help the student forward, I think this text based communication is
happening. It's cool to have it in in kind of the metaverse see, we are setting but it's, it's not like the main thing, right, people are more excited about when you can personalize the experience by visually also on kind of spatially, I guess that's maybe the answer that is personalization, through voice and text is what recurrently can have. And that still takes years to like really play out and be applied properly. And all the language learning models that get trained, trained accordingly
and so on. But yeah, then getting from that to 2d, so they always illustrations and explanations can intelligently also follow schematics and things. And then obviously, next step is like, you know, explain me in 3d, like, you know, make, I don't know, a model of a planetary system and explain me, like, the moon phases or whatever. Like, all that stuff being created by AI would be pretty crazy, right? Yeah. That's basically where we're headed. I don't know what the unknown unknowns are there. I
mean, nobody knows. But the potential is basically mind blowing next. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, it will not hallucinate when it does.
It's hallucinate would mean something totally different in a 3d dream, like, you know, immersive environment. It's like actual hallucinations. You see, you see dragons, you see oases.
Yes. We actually had like a purple flower, you would eat it. And then after like, a minute, some weird stuff would go to another place for a while, and eventually will end. And
it's interesting to hear you say, I didn't expect you to start that answer with when the VR environments are a little more sophisticated in their ability to display graphics and things. I didn't expect you to start there. But it makes a lot of sense. This, I have not. It's funny. I mean, I've thought about AI based non player characters inside VR environments, or the idea of being able to personalize certain aspects of a VR
experience. But the vision that you're painting right now, I've actually really never heard anybody say, which is, you put on a headset, and then you can basically create the world around you, you say, oh, I want to know about this. And then you get a 2d picture or a 3d model that you can play with right there. And you say, Yeah, let's change the color. Let's do this.
I want to see that. I mean, it makes a ton of sense is, it's a pretty now that I say it, I learned a pretty clear extension of both of these technologies and where they could go. But it is pretty mind blowing. I mean, it literally feels like you know, Dream creation. And you could create your own music in
there, right? Because AI does that you can create your own video content, you can create your own, you can create game experiences that's coming, I think quite soon, the idea that AI can actually create game mechanics on its own. So yeah, yeah. Tell me more. I think this is a vision I I've never quite heard anybody say, and it really is a little bit mind bending.
It's a bit like overlaps. I think with in general, kind of what a games like in future because games are basically like the interactive experiences. One theme that is kind of coming through is that you have the design phase, and then you have the playing phase of the game. And then this spectrum will, there'll be like a spectrum of stuff that now the player can do, which used to be like something that designer had
to decide beforehand, right. But it kind of, I guess, player becomes a bit of a designer as well. And it doesn't mean that actually they're designing stuff it just in the course of the experience it kind of can really significantly adjust to your preferences basically put you in all kinds of cool situations. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's like a big topic, how it relates to education. Also, you mentioned these companion bots and stuff like that is also like
an infinite thing. You know, you can just hang out with some character who knows anything, right. I think you had this discussion with a few previous guests as well.
Yeah, that's yeah, this is basically as far as I've thought about this, but with the division that you're laying out where you can, I don't know if any of the listeners are of you have played the game Scribblenauts or like, granite is an extra Mario Maker like there's certain games that sort of encourage that kind of behavior that you're saying, you know, encourage the player to be a designer, or to, you know, use their sort of imaginative
capacity to change the game. But the idea of that doing being doing that in an immersive environment sounds crazy. It will probably be a game mechanic before. It's an educational game mechanic, but it is so powerful in an educational setting.
Yeah, and scribble notes, they handmade all the Brazilian art assets. Right? Exactly. Nowadays will be quite different. You can make anything, but I'm also reminded of is this I think it's again, Khan Academy, they had this one mode where you can talk to, you know, Albert Einstein will explain explain your physics concepts or something like this. They can really kind
of roleplay. And so another thing maybe which is relevant that with this Metaverse and this kind of coming, and people being in social spaces, I think a lot of kind of forms of art and spending time which required people to come together physically, but which are quite niche like, I don't know, some kind of improv theater is really
nice. But let's say you live somewhere in the out in the woods, and you don't really have the kind of five people who want to go to a comedy club with or play disc golf or whatever, you can do this stuff in 3d world. Yeah, there's actually a great series of the sphere. Maybe that could be one of the resources.
If you ask in the end, there is this guy who made movies about people in VR chat, which are very kind of forward looking, which is one of the metaverse see apps, you can access an Oculus quest and on PC with a VR
headset. And it's looking kind of forward to it's like a forward looking in a sense that it explains during pandemic how people had these entire lives just online, you know, who got married, they had, like, went to belly dancing classes just hang out together, because he's really sincere relationship is take a glimpse of the future, you know, that most of us probably don't think about, but really, for the next generation of people, it will be just like natural, real world, and our
world will blend. We work where you play, it won't really matter much which Is it real or digital? Yeah.
Once we learn, right. And I think that interesting tension, or the sort of dual sided nature of the realization that educational, immersive educational VR experiences are sort of an adventure, like a movie or a lab, or something that feels like it's a sort of experience that is contained, where you can then complement it with multimodal types of learning.
And then this other version of the AR AR XR, where you're living, like you said, you're living a whole life, maybe you're inventing something with three other people around the world, and you're all standing around it and chatting and moving and imagining new things that feels much more ongoing and
immersive. And I think we're going to see different models of this come up at over the next decade of the difference between the sort of future class or dreamscape model where you like, go in and do one adventure and then come out and say, Okay, what did I learn? Let's make sense of it, versus the whole thing happens online. Personally, I think the first one is really powerful. Right now, I think the metaverse narrative slightly threw things
off. I mentioned this earlier, but because it can feel so intense to think of a whole life being lived online, or a whole class or whole school, that I think it just sort of freaked people out. We'll get there eventually there will be reasons to do that. And some people already do, like you just mentioned, but I think it's real progress for the educational VR world to sort of learn how it fits into our existing educational lines. And it sounds like you've done a huge amount
of work on that. Hi, thanks.
Lots more to do. But yeah, I think we've been progress. Also, I think it's interesting that there is a few companies that doing kind of related things to us in VR education space. And it seems to be all kind of independently came to a quite similar model of you know, you have a module that's maybe like 30 minutes long. To tackle a certain topic, you have like a problem driven
kind of learning. So you have you know, some motivation while you're doing it, instant feedback, some room for error, some theory and practice kind of in cycles. It's not really it's interesting that, to me, it's an interesting that elements are quite quite similar for this. So hopefully that shows that we're onto something. Yeah,
I think you're definitely all onto something that works really well for engagement for learning outcomes, and that fits into the existing schooling environment. As we continue to unbundle education, people will try all sorts of things, but you know, you're totally right. I remember talking to practice labs to have their Shin from practice. Their stuff is for corporations, their stuff is for the training dei training for corporations. It's exactly the same model. It's
half our modules. They do them every like week or two. Yeah, I think it's every one maybe even once a month and you they put you in a real scenario and you get feedback and then you come out it's so similar, but that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. People are sort of finding a model that really clicks with the customer base. And then as people are more and more comfortable with VR, the whole field will evolve. And everybody will try continue to
try innovative things. So we always end our podcast with two questions. One is about what's the most exciting trend that you see in the EdTech? landscape? I know we've talked a lot about VR XR, Mr. And actually haven't talked much about mixed reality. But we've talked a lot about VR, and we've talked about AI, what do you see coming around the corner, besides being able to create your own world that people should keep an eye on in terms of the future of edtech?
Yeah, so I think we went already somewhat into generative AI. So the other one, I think that is interesting is that schooling, or education will will perhaps kind of be unbundled from the school house, so to say, or from the physical space or learning can also happen while you're living your life. Basically, using your mobile apps or using your VR device, not necessarily at home. I don't have too much like, it's
kind of a general sense. Just because when you go digital, the physical space becomes digital. And a lot of the stuff you can do physically will find like a digital twin, so to say, yeah, actually, this is like I see a lot of we come back to the
Estonian air tech. So there is we have like a tech Estonia Association, there's a whole number of them an attempt of US companies that are trying to innovate and make better different parts of the school, whether it's just breaking down the courses, whether you can deliver them online, whether you can reach your set of extracurricular courses available across the country, like no matter where you live, whether it's empowering teachers with really well created tool
sets to giving lessons. So you don't necessarily need like the super qualified best teacher all the time, anybody can almost do it. There's an initiative that makes girls basically, there are no guys involved, and lets girls from a young age be involved in robotics and technology, and thereby in the end, hopefully end up in tech, as a lot of really awesome initiatives. And one of the things that Estonia in general has this kind of a backbone in the whole country where everything is very
digitized. And the idea is also that education, a lot of it is already online, in terms of the grades and the school system. The idea is that in the end, you can perhaps have all these different tools available to learn different things. And then you can kind of pick and choose
as a student. So depending on whether you like this type of learning environment more that kind, but the important thing is that the output you get, it can now plug back into the same system that records your, you know, academic progress from when you go to school until when you graduate. This kind of a future it's it's a bit like, it's a big problem. A lot of
people are working on it. But I think building towards the future, which I guess multimodal is really the best word I can use for education can happen in many ways, reflecting the different ways, neurodiversity, you know how people learn in different ways, how there are different ways, also geographically available. So I think building the system, and perhaps Estonia has been quite innovative. Like we've had, you know, online voting since I might be saying it wrong now.
But long time 1015 years, maybe more a lot of things that the rest of the world is still kind of catching on to the hopefully in education as well, because we're a small country. And we have all this infrastructure, we can hopefully make some headway here to kind of show how it could work in a big digital like ecosystem. So it was a big mouth. Yes. I mean, think about like trends and bundling stuff. I think connecting it all to like one system would be really
valuable. That's, you know, obviously not ruled by any one corporation or ministry, but it's just kind of governed IntelliJ intelligently, like internet. Yeah,
we were talking about sending to Busan, who has traveled all through Europe, looking at different types of edtech environments. She she runs the European edtech. Alliance. And she was super impressed by the Estonian edtech ecosystem, partially for exactly the reasons you just named, which is that it's a country that is really digitally sophisticated and digital tools are sort of integrated into
people's lives. Which means that there isn't this sort of inherent fear or it feels pretty natural for people to try this kind of digital initiative in education. And that unlocks a whole suite of different types of education like the unbundled type, the unbundled put piecing things together that you don't have to learn in school or at home, you can learn on the go, you can learn by doing a field trip you can learn from
anywhere, it becomes enabled. It reminds me a little bit of what's been happening in South Korea as well and other smallish country that has been so digitally savvy that they've really sort of put everything together for the schools and basically allowed people to have incredibly high bandwidth, access to digital tools
everywhere they go. And you're seeing some of the same thing you're seeing these whole alternative education systems start to evolve, where it doesn't have to be through traditional schooling but then they have standardized tests, for example, that become the hub that you mentioned that everybody said, it's training for, I think the combination of the sort of these different social approaches to education and to technology are really sort of pioneering a new path or
what things might look like you see it in the US in pockets. You see, there's, there's some schools, there are some districts that sort of have gone really out of their way to be very digital first, and they have this kind of thing, every you know, every kid has devices, everybody is sort of connected through all of these different systems. So that you know, you can always get help when you need it, you have video content that is coming from everywhere.
And those schools did much better during the pandemic than others, because they were prepared for that kind of unbundled learning. It's an interesting field, and I think really important for it like,
yeah, and definitely just just thinking about all these topics, like there are so many open questions and things to discover. So definitely no one country is like perfectly doing everything. And there's so many good things happening everywhere. And one thing that I've also found, and it's very obvious when you're thinking about it now, but education is really, really complicated, and people are complicated, and what to even learn and how to teach.
And it's a lifelong journey to like, figure out how to do it best. So yeah, I'm glad that like immersive technologies, AI like technology, you can definitely kind of scale it right. Ideally, the good practices. So yeah, I mean, the idea is that you drop in our headset in some part of the world where maybe they live in a mud hut, and you just put it on and you start figuring out how to like, do something better, so they
can learn how to build a kitchen. That's one of the really interesting.
Exactly, exactly. I mean, when you develop something for anybody else in another country, you should actually go there and figure out what matters to them. Not think that, you know, big caveat there. But yeah, in general, like the kind of the experiential nature of doing things should be good. One of the very good ways to learn a whole bunch of things in life.
So tell us about a couple of resources that you would recommend for anybody who wants to sort of really start to get their head around this VR education world and where it's all going.
Yeah, I think we probably the primer book for Metaverse related things is Matthew Bozeman. The Metaverse how it will revolutionize everything. It's just a good primer for it's pretty detailed, I guess, about the different ways. So current platforms like how they monetize like all the different metaphors. Sorry, I should maybe start Metaverse has been defined there as like a real time. It's a long definition. But basically, it's real time 3d space where people own stuff and things happen like
immediately. And it's actually very, we're very far from it throw nowadays, you think internet is like online in real time. But actually, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the background happening to make it look like it but it's not really that online, especially in games, like all the clever tricks that hide kind of the time it takes to transfer information all over the place, and some packets get lost and all that stuff. But yeah, so the
metaverse is a great book. It offers some speculations into the future as well. But mainly like kind of looks at what we should do to kind of have a successful open Metaverse because the amount of it's basically the economy and the kind of riches that there will be to go around. It's much too big to be controlled by any one or any 10 companies even it's so all encompassing. So the legal system, the all kinds of things really need to accommodate for
that. And it's definitely coming like there is no no to kind of stop it. So maybe I'm sounding a bit preachy, but I think it's an interesting look into the future. And when you look at your, you know, 10 year old Roblox playing kit, and it all make sense. Exactly, exactly. They just buy, you know, digital stuff and don't really care about the clothes that much, you know, stuff like that.
So we've been debating on this show for a while whether the metaverse will be more open source or sort of collaborative or owned by, you know, a couple of the big tech companies and I've personally gone back and forth on it just not in terms of which is better, but in terms of which will actually happen. But I agree with you. As of right now it feels like it's not going to be Metaverse brought to you by metta or Google or
I mean, maybe partially, maybe that system will offer some benefits. I think probably the Roblox is of the world, there's not that many of them there is basically Roblox and fortnight and maybe Minecraft have a real advantage as well, because they have like a whole ecosystem of different things you kind of need. But anyway, I think they'll probably be many different solutions. And, and that's good because they need to compete to kind of
offer the best outcome. But hopefully everything being kind of connected together in the end, and the network effects that will bring will force everyone to open up as much as possible. So I think that's that's a good thing that I mentioned before this is called
we met in virtual reality. And I think there is also these people in VR chat I see listed here which is I think the follow on more specific series, right, but basically this both of these are great insights into what the online world could look like. And education wise. I don't know if I have like a resource. I think there is like your previous people in the show have referred a lot of great stuff
already. So So you could check out that check Estonia site and kind of marvel at the great digitalization we have going on here. If you'd like that.
That's a good suggestion. I imagine that something not a lot of listeners have done yet. And I think that would be very interesting to see all the things that are happening there. So as always, we will put the show notes in the show notes for this episode links to all the resources that might just recommended the the metaverse, the Matthew ball book, we met in virtual reality that sounds so interesting, this sort of film about pandemic fueled Virtual Reality communities, and the link to the
tech Estonia website. And you can see everything happening in edtech in this very innovative digital first country. Thanks so much for being here with me March. Futuclass is doing really interesting things in chemistry and physics. They have a module where you build your own kitchen from scratch, like that's why we mentioned that earlier, as well.
It's not biochemistry, just to be clear, we have like a few other curriculum, kind of catering activities coming as well. So vocational schools, but yeah, there's that content that's increasing a lot. And we also have partner apps that offer more of it.
Exactly. And also partner apps and music, art and other subjects. It's a really interesting model. And you've obviously sort of cracked some of the code about how to get classrooms to really be able to incorporate VR into their world. So thank you so much for being here with us on edtech insiders.
Thanks so much.
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