What is the Metaverse and How is it Transforming Education? Key Reflections from ASU+GSV

Imagine a classroom where high school students are immersed in a virtual reality game that lets them travel through ancient Rome. In realistic 3D, they’re exploring traditional Roman architecture, seeing daily life in action, and visiting historical landmarks.

Now picture a group of middle school students using a game to model how redlining has unfolded over the last seventy years in a dynamic immersive medium. They’re working together to better understand how the communities around them have been shaped and learning about how they might build a more equitable future.

Compare these images with how you probably learned about these topics: a lecture? A textbook? A video?

When we build games that allow students to have meaningful, deep engagement with content, we bring the potential of digital interactive mediums to life. Within these conversations is talk of the “metaverse” - something that tends to elude definition but that has big implications for the future of gaming and education. 

These were key topics at this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual gathering hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) and Global Silicon Valley (GSV) that connects leading minds focused on transforming society and business around learning and work.

Photo: ASU+GSV

Endless CEO and Founder Matt Dalio spoke on a panel that explored “How the Metaverse and Gaming Can Transform Education” alongside Steven Isaacs (Epic Games), Rebecca Kantar (Roblox), Aaron Sisto (Schmidt Futures), and Justin Edwards (Microsoft). 

Here are some key reflections from the panel:

Wait, what’s a metaverse again?

Aaron Sisto—the Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures—kicked off the panel with one of the most cohesive definitions we’ve heard of the metaverse so far: “Just imagine a network of virtual worlds that are highly immersive and allow for a very compelling virtual presence, but also allow people to move between them easily, democratically, share content, and engage in not only just the virtual world, but the real world too.”

Rebecca Kantar, the Head of Education at Roblox, continued: “[The metaverse is] not about … sitting in front of a screen, living a virtual life instead of your real one. It's instead about facilitating human co-experience and connection and playful learning…”  So often in education, games are played individually as opposed to a team of students truly working on something that a team of adults would work on in real life. “Being able to bring that to the metaverse, I think will be really exciting.”

The metaverse opens opportunities for students to build real world skills

Steve Isaacs, the Education Program Manager at Epic Games (the home of Fortnite, Rocket League, and a host of other wildly popular consumer games) believes the metaverse offers unique opportunities for students to build skills that will help them in their future careers. “The Metaverse is being built on game technology ... So we're in a position to support both the next generation of those builders, but also … a wide array of industries—fashion, animation, TV and film—are really being transformed by this technology. So if we can get students up to speed in these skills in secondary school, we're creating opportunities, often alternate pathways, for kids.” 

Educational games can impact outside the classroom

While the metaverse is exciting and new, still taking shape as something that can be integrated into classrooms, more traditional video games - the ones that kids are already playing - also have a lot of potential to impact education for the better.

According to Dalio, the average kid graduates from school having spent 10,000 hours playing video games; “The promise of games is [the potential] to turn those discretionary hours into learning hours.”

But teens don't always want to go from school to homework to a learning game. Figuring out how to build games that speak to where kids “authentically want to be” is key. Dalio says teens in particular are curious and social. “If you lean into the fact that the teen mind wants to build, whether it's artistically or creatively or through art or 3D modeling or storytelling, and you give them a platform through games, to be able to learn by building and by doing something they authentically want to do, that is how you can get some of those 10,000 hours.”

Sisto agrees: There are tons of opportunities to “make education an active feature in a lot of these games…and for kids and even adults to still have fun and not even realize that they're learning and growing intellectually.” This is especially true for building soft skills, “where we're not necessarily running through a textbook or curriculum, but more training in dialogue and memory and attention,” which are skills that seem to be where entrepreneurs are becoming more and more focused.

Kids can be creators

Tantamount to this work is the opportunity for kids to become creators—not just consumers—of these virtual worlds. This is particularly important for Dalio, whose vision includes equipping all kids with the 21st century skills necessary for every child to become a creator. He realized the importance of this when talking to computer engineers on his team: “I would ask the question, how did you learn [to code]? And the answer was basically almost always…'I hacked my games as a kid.’”

Encouraging kids to “hack” their video game worlds by diving into code and game mechanics will continue to persist in the gaming education world. Isaacs agreed that it’s central to their work at Epic: “Our whole mission is that player to creator pipeline.”

Meaningful partnerships between educators and game developers is key

Building high quality educational games will take collaboration between educators and game designers. The most difficult part is marrying true expertise, says Kantar. “We all as practitioners have a responsibility to try and encourage game designers and instructional and learning designers to try and bridge that gap more and think about how they might…bring [their expertise] to everyone’s teams to think in a way that really marries the learning objectives and the mechanics all the way through.”

Good game designers leverage game technology to be about more than just adding in a reward system after the fact. Instead, they use “the impetus for learning as the very thing that drives the way kids are spending time in the activities.” Leveraging this with the expertise of people who are deeply familiar with learning science and content standards will contribute to a high quality learning metaverse.

Creating high-impact games doesn’t have to be expensive

Dalio brought up his work with Terminal Two as a good example of creating compelling games without a wealth of resources. By partnering with developers who had decades of experience building consumer games, they were able to  develop high quality games that taught a variety of different mechanics with the fun and the learning cranked up.

While it’s hard to pin down exactly what the metaverse actually is (and will become), it’s clear that building virtual worlds that kids can learn and create in while acquiring skills that translate to the real world has a ton of potential. We’re excited to watch how the metaverse and a new suite of high-quality learning games bring new experiences for kids and classrooms in the coming years.