Imagine being able to step into a rainforest and come face to face with the animals that live there. Picture placing yourself at the scene of a historical event, to hear the roar of the crowd as a pivotal new leader is elected. Or even venturing into the solar system, to explore the planets beyond Earth.
Now imagine doing it all from the safety of a classroom. Thanks to virtual reality (VR), that’s possible.
“Imagine you had a TV, but you could go into that TV and interact with the environment,” says Kevin Daly, a longtime educator with a passion for technology. “That’s really what VR gives you. As a teacher, it allows me to take students to the top of a volcano or to the deepest ocean trench, or even into outer space. There’s so much you can do with it.”
Once just a bold futuristic idea, VR is being used in classrooms around Australia as an innovative new form of interactive education. Leading the charge is Mindflight7, an Australian business that creates and facilitates education programs that run on VR headsets. Students pop on a headset, plug in a program and dive into immersive worlds that grab their attention and expand their knowledge.
Launched in 2021, Mindflight7 was devised as a career exploration program – a way to help secondary students try simulations of work in different fields, to get a sense of what they might like to do after school. But when feedback from schools said students could benefit from this sort of learning across the board, Mindflight7 quickly expanded to cover experiential learning programs for every subject, at every year level.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s maths or English, Mindflight7 has enough content, apps and expertise to cover all subjects,” says Daly, Mindflight7’s in-house educator.
VR in classrooms offers numerous benefits. For one, it’s a way for educators to push the limits of learning. A chemistry experiment, for instance, can be dangerous with real-life chemicals – but completely safe with VR. And it can take complex topics out of textbooks and into the real world, making them easier to understand.
“In VR, you can actually give the student a tactile experience of manipulating an atom,” Daly says.
It also offers a way to cater to different learning styles. Students who struggle with abstract concepts or standard book learning might be engaged with VR and more hands-on approaches. And in the era of school refusal, student engagement is a problem all schools urgently need to tackle.
Mindflight7’s CEO and co-founder, Kajal Pala, says: “Currently a lot of the schools are going through that issue of, if your students are not engaged, regardless of what they are being taught, they’re not going to grasp that concept. So we’re making learning more fun and exciting for them, and getting that engagement part right.”
One of the schools Mindflight7 works with experienced an up to 60% increase in knowledge retention and abstract concept understanding in maths after using VR, Pala says.
The idea, the team says, isn’t to replace typical book learning but to supplement it. VR combines the expertise and human effort of teachers with the use of technology in a way that can make a significant impact on students’ learning journeys. In years past, bringing technology into the classroom might have meant the teacher rolling in the TV to show the class a documentary, or, more recently, showing students a YouTube education series. VR takes that up a level.
Daly says: “[Schools] don’t have to change the way they are thinking. All they have to do is make learning more fun and exciting by exposing students to a 3D space rather than an education video. So the teacher does their normal lesson, but then they might use VR to reinforce the learning and give students a different experience.”
Mindflight7 has more than 500 clients spread across every state and territory in Australia. The bulk of its clients are primary and high schools, but it has recently begun working with TAFEs and universities as well. The possibilities are so big with VR learning that Mindflight7’s programs can even be used to simulate open heart surgery.
By its side every step of the way has been NAB, Mindflight7’s banking partner.
Yuan Liang, a Mindflight7 co-founder, says: “When we started, it was very early Covid days, and we went through probably six months to eight months of product development and testing. But just before we went to market, we were hit by the longest lockdown in Melbourne. So we were locked out from all our clients and without revenue. We were really stuck. NAB helped us with the Covid loan that got us through that really tough lockdown period.”
NAB also provided funding to Mindflight7 to help with cashflow, as the business rapidly expanded post-pandemic.
Now, Mindflight7 is looking to the future – and dreaming big.
Pala says: “Our vision is really to be in every school in Australia, as well as overseas. So this is really just the beginning, and we want to see every school making the most of VR for their students – and, hopefully, improving the learning journey in a way that never existed before with this revolutionised way of teaching.”
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