Our projects & Approach
Reimagining Education
From the 6th largest public school district in the U.S. to high schools in south-central Los Angeles and west-side Chicago,…
We partner with public schools and other educational programs, primarily in under-resourced and marginalized communities, to teach students and teachers how to harness the power and potential of XR – and tools such as ChatGPT – to reimagine new pedagogies for education and learning.
Through an “innovation sprint” project-based approach, we train the teachers and students how to create their own educational assets and design new curriculum using immersive and experiential teaching methods that incorporate edu-tainment and gamification techniques.
Building Awareness & Empathy for Social Causes
We are partnered with the leading digital communications ITU agency from the United Nations to explore how to use XR experiences to bring education, awareness, and empathy to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
From the United Nations SDGs to a world-renowned Museum focused on bringing cultural preservation to local communities…
We design and build virtual environments for these organizations – their own customized Metaverse – that help them tell stories to engage their stakeholders into life-like 360-degree and 3D immersive experiences.
Upskilling Youth In Low Income Communities
As featured in a 2022 BBC article, we are examples of youth from under-served public school systems who have been trained and upskilled into new-economy job relevancy
In addition, our goal is to place these individuals into compensated positions on our own projects we do for schools and social-impact organizations. The individuals we mentor and upskill are from the actual communities that that we work with, and this creates a highly effective peer-to-peer element to our projects; i.e., a student we upskilled who recently graduated from a low-income school is now working with us as a project lead at that same school to help them use XR to transform education and learning.
Reimagining Education
For these school projects we typically work with about 20 students, administrators, and teachers to conduct a pilot. We start by working with the teachers to identify a topic or subject matter that feel they have always struggled with getting students engaged, and thus students progress in learning that subject has suffered. Essentially, we are asking the school which subjects do they feel traditional methods and tools of education are not proving sufficient. Our objective is to then explore and experiment with these new tools we are introducing to see if better results may be obtained. Specifically, we want to explore with the students and teachers how virtual reality may be applied using immersive and experiential methods for learning. We then work with the students, teachers, and administrators over a multi-month project to test different educational pedagogies using VR, while incorporating “edu-tainment” and gamification techniques. The Exponential Destiny team trains the students and teachers on how to design and create in VR (a non-technical skillset), so that they become the developers of their own solutions and are ultimately self-sufficient.
Our Approach
If you are an educational organization – public school, after school program, adult learning center, summer camp – we would like to partner with you to experiment with new tools and methods using VR to dramatically improve education and learning:
The Issues & Market Failures within the Public Education System We Are Attempting to Address
RELEVANCY:
One issue is keeping the education curriculum relevant – keeping up with the exponential pace of change – to prepare students for the new emerging digital economy. “How we teach and what is being taught” needs a refresh.
HYPER-AUTOMATION & DISPLACEMENT:
Another issue is preparing students for new emerging jobs, and not those traditional skills that will or are being automated away by artificial intelligence and robotics. Even “coding” is a skillset that is becoming less relevant, as AI is becomes more advanced and sophisticated. Students may think they are learning skills in school to prepare them for a career, if not simply job security, however much of the current curriculum being taught in public schools is becoming outdated in terms of pragmatic entrepreneurial skillsets required for a student to be relevant in the swiftly ever-emerging technology-enabled economy.
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT:
A third challenge is the struggle for teachers to engage their students into their own education process, while competing with attention deficit disorders brought on by a generation being raised on the digital addictions and instant gratification of social media. We often hear, “my students are tuning out and becoming hard-wired to digital stimulus, making it more difficult to engage them in their education.”
GENERATION LOST:
Lastly, of near-term immediate consequence compounding the matter, there is a significant learning chasm created by the recent global pandemic.
To this last point specifically, brought on by a global pandemic in 2020, the world changed dramatically, forcing the education field to rapidly adopt and adapt to digital remote learning for over 55 billion school students in the United States (U.S.) (Garcia, E., & Weiss, E., 2020). Despite herculean efforts by educators nationwide, studies demonstrate decreased student engagement, chronic absenteeism, and pronounced inequities in student technology access (Garcia, E., & Weiss, E., 2020). These factors are predicted to have devastating, long-term economic effects for all students, but even more so for communities of color and low-income students. The estimated average learning loss for students is seven months, but Black students may fall behind by 10.3 months, Hispanic students by 9.2 months, and low-income students by more than a year. A recent McKinsey report estimates that the average K–12 student in the United States could lose between $61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings (in constant 2020 dollars), or the equivalent of a year of full-time work (Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E., 2020).
These were the predictions (above) in 2020, fast-forward to October 2022 in the aftermath of the major impact of the pandemic, and the following October 2022 study reported the actual signals of the initial effect being felt in the U.S. education system:
“The Covid-19 pandemic spared no state or region as it caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, erasing decades of academic progress and widening racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis.
Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.”
Those are the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — which tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the U.S. this year (2022). It was the first time the test had been given since 2019, and it’s seen as the first nationally representative study of the pandemic’s impact on learning.
Potential and Promise: The Early Efficacy Data for Education & Learning in VR
Faced with the issues and market failures in the public education system (per above), it is clear that innovation is essential to meet these challenges. Fortunately, in early 2020 there was a significant inflection point in the advancement and innovation of virtual reality (VR) capabilities –i.e., exponentially improving quality of experience combined with dramatically declining cost for hardware and software. As important, there were some early efficacy studies that were emerging that were signalling game-changer potential when introducing immersive and experiential methods of learning to students within VR.
One noteworthy initial efficacy study really struck a chord with us at Exponential Destiny. Specifically, the following 2020 Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) independent study (see Chart) :
(full report: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tech-effect/emerging-tech/virtual-reality-study.html)
The report highlights the dramatic (exponential vs. incremental) improvements in training and education when comparing learning in Virtual Reality to classroom and on-line learning approaches.
Furthermore, what was interesting to us at Exponential Destiny about this PwC study is that it was released in 2020, thus is was performed actually using VR technology from 2019, which was pre-Covid pandemic. We knew that due to the global Covid pandemic, there was a sharp and sudden rise in interest and demand for remote digital collaboration, and we observed first-hand how innovation in VR technology accelerated dramatically in 2020 and 2021. Thus, our feeling was that this PwC study was already outdated since the technology had advanced so much since this study was conducted, and therefore our assumption was that the integration of VR into education using the latest VR tools would most likely be significantly more effective and impressive if conducted today.
This is part of our mission today for why we created Exponential Destiny, to further explore this untapped potential of VR being used in education using the latest technology available, and specifically when applied in public schools in marginalized communities where the education system is suffering the most.
However, our big question was whether the impressive results of the 2020 PwC study (above) – which was more centric to corporate training and education environments – could be achieved in the public education system, and furthermore could it be effective, affordable, and scalable in under-resourced – even struggling – lower income communities?
This curiosity – as to the real potential of VR in public education within under-served communities – is the basis of the work we do today.
We feel there is real potential because from our own work in this field we know that the technical aptitude required to create in these environments has become very low; for example, the required skillset to become a creator in the metaverse, using various new Metaverse design platforms, was more akin to “power-point in 3D” vs. writing computer programming code. In other words, a non-technical person, like a high school student or teacher, using no programming/coding skillset, could create and even thrive in using and even developing these virtual environments. We see the potential opportunity for a school to be self-sufficient and not dependent on outside costly resources, since students and teachers can be easily trained in these environments and use the capability to create new educational pedagogies.
Also, in talking with educators, it was clear a teacher in an under-performing public school would be ecstatic with even fractional results as was reported in the PwC efficacy study, and thus we felt this potential result would be an incentive for a traditional school (not typically willing or able to try new things) to at least experiment and explore the potential of this new capability.
Lastly, since Exponential Destiny’s leadership team was comprised predominantly of recent high school graduates from an under-resourced school community in south-central Los Angeles, we knew first-hand the potential to use these immersive and experiential digital environments to entice and engage students to partake in their education. We personally discovered how fun and creative it was to learn in VR, especially when applying “edu-tainment” based methods, incorporating prize and game-theory.
The puzzle started to come together, and at Exponential Destiny we felt a passion that led to the formulation of a mission to explore, research, and pioneer the adaptation and adoption of VR and related Metaverse innovations into the struggling public education system to address the Issues and Market Failures described previously (above).
As a result of doing our own experimentation with introducing VR into public high schools in under-resourced communities, we have developed some of our own research results and insights. You can review those here
Project Approach & Methodology
When we originally formed Exponential Destiny, we wanted to test our theory and see if we could obtain similarly impressive results as the PwC efficacy study (above) while evaluating the potential of applying VR in an under-resourced public-school environment. However, we didn’t want to spend a lot of time with school bureaucracies and “red-tape” trying to gain school-board level approval to evaluate bringing this emerging capability into a public school. Thus, we adopted an “Edge” change-management strategy for innovation; rather than working top-down by approaching a school board (a.k.a., the “Core”) to review and approve introducing this capability into a school system, we decided to work on the ”Edge”; identify an open-minded public-school leader and innovator that would collaborate with us on an initial proof-of-concept to pilot and experiment with designing a methodology and approach for using virtual reality in their school and classrooms. This bottom-up approach required “asking for forgiveness” vs. “permission” with the broader school district, with the goal to quickly start experimenting hands-on with this innovation in real learning situations with students and teachers. Our theory of impact and change was that if we could demonstrate success with one school in one classroom (bottom-up) – with teachers and students taking ownership – it would create momentum that could have a broader domino and ripple effect for the organic adoption by the entire school and even broader school district.
Also, through our own pilots with schools, we also started to tap into the powerful potential and notion of “Edu-Tainment” based learning in VR; creating entertaining and even gamified immersive experiences in VR that make learning engaging and fun, even for today’s students that are being hard-wired with short attention spans by social media. Not to say there are not real risks and concerns to exposing young people (and society at large) to these virtual worlds (i.e., addiction, isolationism, escapism), however we feel in the field of education and learning it is an incremental and potentially powerful tool.
At Exponential Destiny we have designed and implemented three types of engagement models and approaches for how we work with a school system or educational group (below). Each approach differs depending on objectives and desired outcome, budget, time duration, learning environment, and student profile. A key to our approach when we engage with students and teachers on these projects is that the Exponential Destiny leads who conduct the project and related training are themselves recent graduates from public high schools in similar communities. This relatability factor is important for the self confidence of students (and teachers) who therefore are observing their peers as specialist and mentors.
- One Day Workshop: “VR Introduction and Demonstration”- Exponential Destiny has a project that typically takes place over a one or two-day in-person workshop in which we assist individuals with a basic overview and awareness building on Metaverse hardware and software, as well as the emerging field of “this next generation of the internet”. The goal is to build enthusiasm among learners, as well as educate the teachers and administrators on the potential of introducing this new toolset into their curriculum design. For this workshop, leads from Exponential Destiny (who are young former students themselves from similar under-resourced schools), conduct the training and we bring in all of the VR headsets and software.
- 4-6 Week ‘Lite’ Sprint – ““VR Basic Training, Awareness, and Exposure” - Exponential Destiny also has a project that extends the One Day workshop (above) to run for approximately 4-6 weeks whereby we engage with a group of students/learners with the goal of building their awareness but also providing basic skills development and training around the emerging Metaverse and related innovation and capabilities. For example, we worked with a summer STEM camp in Los Angeles, whereby we engaged with middle-school to high-school level students over the course of a 4-week period to provide them with a basic understanding and appreciation for the emerging “Metaverse”. This included basic training on the VR hardware and software, but also how and why it is a valuable skillset and competency for them to learn to make them more relevant for the future of work across various industries and sectors.
- 5-6 Month Proof-of Concept – “VR Pilot and Innovation Sprint” – This is our primary and most extensive collaboration model with a school or educational program. This is a more robust approach whereby we focus on exploring true transformative and sustainable change.The objective of the 5-6 month initiative it to train the school (teachers and students) to design and develop their own educational assets in VR that prove to be highly effective and complementary to learning when combined with more traditional methods. As part of this integration and asset creation process, the goal is to develop an MVE or “minimum viable experience”, that requires the least amount of resources (cost and training) to deliver a superior educational and learning experience. This is part of a gradual change management approach that we follow at Exponential Destiny called “Crawl, Walk, Run”. In this initial “Crawl” phase we strive to prove the concept with the least amount of friction and cost, in order to demonstrate the potential of this emerging capability as a means to get all stakeholders (e.g., students, teachers, administrators, etc.) aligned and excited about moving further to explore this type of educational pedagogy.
Listed below are examples of our 5-6 month Proof of Concept that we have completed with several public high schools in under-served communities, including in-depth videos that further describe our approach and results.
OUR RESEARCH PROJECTS & CASE-STUDIES
Educational programs and institutions we’ve worked with to explore integrating immersive & experiential methods using XR into their curriculum
2021 - Broward County, Florida - Our First Pilot School District (6th largest school district in the U.S.
In early 2021 we identified leaders from an ideal public school in a lower income community; Broward County Public Schools, the 6th largest school district in the United States. We worked with the Chief Administration Officer and his team of pioneers (i.e., teachers, students, administrators) from the school district. In addition, we engaged award-winning national educators/teachers from an educational non-profit, the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL). We secured funding for this initial project from Verizon corporation. Together, led by Exponential Destiny, the three of us worked on a 6-month engagement to define new educational pedagogies for “immersive and experiential learning” in VR. The proof-of-concept and pilot results were quite extraordinary. The entire recording of the end-of-project summit, in which the full approach and results are shared including the virtual reality Metaverse learning environments created by the students and teachers, can viewed in this recording here:
At Broward County school district, the two topics/subjects chosen by the teachers, students, and administrators to explore in creating educational assets in VR were “Healthy Living on a Budget” and “Financial Literacy – Household Monthly Budgeting and Planning”
From the success of this initial pilot with Broward County Public Schools we learned a lot, not just about deploying and utilizing the VR capabilities and technology, but as importantly we learned about the change management and behavioral aspects of introducing innovation into a traditional school model and environment. For example, we learned how best to engage students and teachers into this process of adopting and using VR to improve their educational capabilities, while also becoming self-sufficient as a school system to institutionalize this innovation into the broader school “DNA”.
At Exponential Destiny, we took the key learnings (successes and failures) from the initial proof-of-concept with Broward County, ameliorated our pilot methodology, and applied those refinements to additional pilots at a series of public high schools.
Honorable Mention: The full funding support and financial donation that made it possible for this entire project was provided through the generous contribution by Verizon corporation, as part of their innovative learning initiative.
2022 - Chicago, Illinois; Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School
At Michele Clark High School, the topics/subjects chosen by the teachers, students, and administrators to explore in creating educational assets in VR were:
- “Social and Emotional Learning Dealing with Urban Trauma” – This topic area was chosen as a result of the school dealing with two recent student deaths resulting from gun violence, and the school community’s desire to experiment with new methods for dealing with the affects of the resulting urban trauma.
- “Learn What it Takes to Pursue a Career Path as a Professional Game Designer” – This topic was chosen by the students, as the had the desire to experiment with building stories in virtual reality that simulated a “day in the life” experience of being a professional in this tech field.
Honorable Mention: The full funding support and financial donation that made it possible for this entire project was provided through the generous contribution by Mesmerise, a leading organization thatproduces the Gatherings metaverse platform.
2022 – South-central Los Angeles; Nava College Preparatory and Ortho Los Angeles High Schools
In 2022 we conducted a 5-month pilot with two high schools in south central Los Angeles; Nava College Preparatory School and Ortho Los Angeles School. These two additional pilots added to our research and helped us develop further insights and learnings as to how to optimize VR to help these under-resourced schools “leap-frog” their capabilities in education and learning.
At these high schools, the topic/subject chosen by the teachers, students, and administrators to explore in creating educational assets in VR was focused on “College Prep – Resources You Need to Know in Selecting a College” –
This topic was chosen by the students (mostly 1st generation college-bound students), as the had the desire to experiment with building stories and immersive experiences in virtual reality that simulated visiting a college campus and getting access to relevant resources (e.g., financial aid process, application process, graduation requirements, etc.). In addition, some students developed educational assets in VR to teach others about “Options for Life After High School”, which explored not only college, but also trade, military, and vocational paths forward.
The VR/AR Association (https://www.thevrara.com/) which is a leading global industry association for Virtual & Augmented Reality, was impressed with the work that Exponential Destiny was doing with the two high schools in south-central Los Angeles , and ultimately produced 3 short-clip episodic videos that together represent a short-form documentary of the experience:
Honorable Mention: The full funding support and financial donation that made it possible for this entire project was provided through the generous contribution by Mesmerise, a leading organization that produces the Gatherings metaverse platform.
2022 – South-central Los Angeles: A summer STEM educational camp for middle-school students
In 2022 we conducted a 3-week training and educational workshop with a summer STEM camp for middle-school students in the south-central Los Angeles community. As part of this training, the Exponential Destiny team exposed the middle school students to the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which were the basis for the experiences the students created in VR.
In the two short videos (below), Cathy Mitchell, the STEM Innovation Director of the “SNAC” program, shares her experience working with Exponential Destiny to incorporate VR and Metaverse education and training into the summer camp STEM program she manages in conjunction with UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) in the south-central Los Angeles community:
Honorable Mention: The full funding support and financial donation that made it possible for this entire project was provided through the generous contribution by Mesmerise, a leading organization that produces the Gatherings metaverse platform.
Building Awareness Around Art & Culture
In November we completed our first workshop at the historic Thomas Jefferson High School (link) in south-central LA. The students were highly engaged and inspired! In preparation for the workshop, and as a selection criteria for participating, each student completed a paper where they described a role model in their own lives, which was shared and discussed before immersing into the Human Atlas VR experiences. Our objective was also to introduce students to VR/Metaverse design and development, and how this emerging technology may be used in various industries and careers.
To conclude, students completed a survey about the workshop to assist us with our research to understand how to optimize immersive and experiential methods of learning using VR, and furthermore, how it may be applied as an educational tool for teachers and students, particularly in underserved/under-resourced schools. We donate to each school enough new VR headsets so that the students can start a “VR Learning Lab” or club to help teachers explore how to incorporate this new tool into their course curriculum.
From November 2023 to January 2024 we did similar workshops at many schools throughout Los Angeles, reaching over 1,000 students in total.
Working with museums and other cultural institutions to do educational community outreach
2023 - Getty Conservation Institute
OUR APPROACH
OUR MUSEUM PROJECTS AND CASE STUDIES
Building Awareness & Empathy for Social Causes
Recent independent efficacy studies show that individual learners who experience content in virtual reality are “3.75 times more emotionally connected to content than classroom leaners”, and have a “275% improved confidence level to act on issues” (see full report). Therefore, we feel there is a real opportunity to assist organizations to draw awareness, empathy, and education to their mission and causes in a fun and engaging way using VR incorporated with the art of story-telling and gamification.
For example, we are working with one of the leading agencies of the United Nations to engage their stakeholder community around their “UN Goals”, or the 17 SDGs of the United Nations.
Our Approach
If you are an organization with a societal impact mission that you would like to “bring it to life” in a customized immersive experience in virtual reality, we would like to partner with you to tell your story. Your own customized Metaverse!
Working in VR we have an abundance of “super-powers” that we may leverage to take your target audience and key stakeholders through an edu-tainment based experience, that helps them connect emotionally to your mission and cause, while illustrating the work and impact your organization is making.
We realize that budgets are tight in most social cause-based NGOs and non-profit organizations that we partner with, and thus we work with you to create these VR experiences using high quality/low cost digital assets (i.e., software, hardware, platforms, 3d images, etc.)
Learn more about our approach….
We utilize creative and innovative engagement techniques, like running a prize model in which an organization’s stakeholders are crowd-sourced through a fun competition format to create experiences in VR that “bring to life” the organization’s mission or cause. (see the United Nations agency collaboration above).
To extend the scale and impact of the VR experience we create for an organization, we also perform outreach whereby we go into an organization’s stakeholder physical community (e.g., a university or high-school, corporate HQ/employee program, etc.) with dozens of VR headsets and conduct a one-day “Discovery Day” whereby we demo for the stakeholders the VR experience that we designed that builds empathy, awareness, and education to the organization’s cause and mission.
There are many creative options for how we use VR to enhance an organization’s message and outreach. We would appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about your ideas and how we may work together! To learn more about projects we have completed, see our OUR RESEARCH PROJECTS & CASE-STUDIES (below)
OUR RESEARCH PROJECTS & CASE-STUDIES
Organizations We Have Worked With to Build Empathy, Awareness & Education to Their Causes:
2022 – United Nations ITU Agency: “Metaverse for SDGs Global Prize & VR Competition”
On March 31st 2023, nearly a year after officially being announced in Geneva, the competition concluded, and 0ver 200 teams submitted their VR experiences to the judging and evaluation process. By Q3 of 2023 the 17 finalist representing the top team per SDG will be announced for two competing age categories (14-18 year-old and a 19+). The winners will be announced and awarded an allocation of a total prize purse of up to $200,000 and their VR experiences for each of the 17 SDGs will be demonstrated at a United Nations related event.
This entire initiative is a a good example of not only how VR may be used to create immersive and engaging experiences that build awareness, empathy, and education for a social cause, it is also a good example of how Exponential Destiny leverages innovative techniques (e.g., prize-theory, gamification, and crowd-sourcing) to engage a stakeholder community into the creation process through fun competition.
A special thank you to our sponsors who have funded the prize purse and operations costs (+15% of purse) for the “Metaverse for SDGs Global Prize & VR Competition”
Supported by
$75,000 Purse
$30,000 Purse
+$15,000 ITU Summit Sponsor
$30,000 Purse
$30,000 Purse
$30,000 Purse
$10,000 Purse
Collaboration Partner
Upskilling Youth In Low Income Communities
Meet Samantha, or ”Sam”. Sam is part of the core leadership team at Exponential Destiny. Like many of her colleagues, Sam grew up in a lower-income community in south-central Los Angeles. She recently graduated from College as an Art major. In her role at Exponential Destiny Sam mentors individuals, her peers, on how to become a “Metaverse” entrepreneur. She is a perfect mentor because she shares her own story about how she was upskilled to be a creative designer in VR, and how she is able to now make an income for herself with this new competency.
Our Approach
At Exponential Destiny many of our founding team members and youth-leaders in our organization are graduates from low-income public schools and communities (e.g., south central Los Angeles). We personally observed and experienced the new job market and economic opportunities that were emerging for those of us that were being trained and upskilled on how to be a designer and creator of VR experiences. Almost immediately after our our training to obtain these new digital skills, we were getting placed into professionally paid projects to help organizations identify and develop use-cases for leveraging VR in their own organizations.
Once we personally realized this potential (i.e., for non-technical youth and adult learners to be upskilled into relevancy for this new emerging digital “Metaverse” economy, resulting in job and income opportunities) we made it part of our mission to act as mentors to help upskill our peers who also are from lower-income communities, so they could be relevant and potentially find similar opportunities.
We implement our youth and adult-learner mentorship model as part of every project we do. For example, when we engage with a school to help them reimagine education (learn more), or work with a social-impact organization to develop their personalized metaverse to build empathy, education, and awareness to their cause (learn more), we integrate into those deliverables our upskilling and mentorship objective. Ultimately our goal is to even find income-making opportunities for the youth we mentor by placing them onto our own projects once their skill have been fully developed through our mentorship and training programs.
Here are some more example of our mentees sharing their experiences and new opportunities that emerged once they were upskilled into this new competency at Metaverse entrepreneurs:
Research Results
Click here to see what we’ve learned from these projects and what our research shows today.
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