| UNFAIR PARK | A teacher communicates to her students in a virtual classroom setting in STEMuli. courtesy Taylor Shead/STEMuli After COVID shut downs, DISD and a private software company join to create a new virtual world for online learning. By Jacob Vaughn SCHOOL 2.0 O 44 n March 18, 2020, with the corona- virus rampant, Dallas Indepen- dent School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa shut down in-person learning temporarily. “Immediately, I get on the phone with the [DISD] chief technology officer and I said ‘What do you all need? How can I help you?’” Taylor Shead, CEO of STEMuli Tech- nology, said. What DISD needed Shead and her com- pany to do is create a virtual platform for students and teachers that could sustain re- mote learning for the foreseeable future. That platform evolved into what STEMuli is calling an “educational metaverse,” a virtual world where students can plan, learn and maybe one day create wealth. Web 3, NFTs and metaverses have all been hot tech topics in recent months, espe- cially after Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta and shifting its focus to virtual reality. All of these concepts come together in DISD’s education meta- verse. The virtual world is being tested at Dallas Hybrid Prep, the state’s first perma- nently hybrid school blending online and in- person teaching. The students’ devices, mostly laptops, tab- lets and smartphones, already have the plat- form installed, so all they have to do is log in and enter STEMuli’s virtual world, but they aren’t just dropped into a classroom. They’re in a virtual world where they can see all their classmates’ avatars, and that’s just the begin- ning of what STEMuli envisions. The world is based on Dallas, so students would see the American Airlines Center and different pieces of the Dallas skyline. While they wait for class to start, the students can drive cars through the world or play games. Then, the teacher starts class on their side of the platform, which immediately transports the students into a virtual class- room for instruction. “It kind of looks like a movie theater,” Shead said. The teacher is on a screen in the front of the class. When they ask the class a question, students can raise their avatar’s hand to answer and earn game points for participating in class. On the STEMuli platform, students are rewarded with game points for doing things like attending class on time and completing assignments. Right now, these game points can be used to upgrade their avatars, but the plan is to al- low students to convert those points into a digital currency that students could earn through participating in school. “It sounds completely disruptive and dif- ferent from the way the classroom works to- day,” Shead said. “But the reason we wanted to do that is because we felt like the reason why people were not choosing to continue their education was because they had to work and they had to provide for their families. We wanted to come up with a way that gave them the ability to do both: provide for their fami- lies and increase their earning potential.” The company’s ambitions get even big- ger, but they started small. Shead has always been interested in see- ing the remote learning experience become easier for students. She grew up in Plano and is the youngest of seven in her family to play Division 1 sports, earning a scholarship to play basket- ball at Loyola Marymount University. She initially wanted to be a reconstructive plas- tic surgeon, but said her math skills weren’t good enough to finish pre-med. Bringing all her school supplies when she traveled to play basketball was stressful, Shead recalled. “It just frustrated me that I wasn’t able to access everything I needed to to keep up with class,” she said. “I’m an Africa-Ameri- can 32-year-old. What that means to me is education was really the only thing that al- lowed my parents to break out of poverty and give my brothers and I all the opportu- nities they gave us. “When I look at education today, the school systems and education just is not in a place where it will continue to allow people to mobilize themselves out of poverty. That is terrifying for me.” Shead said this is at the center of every- thing the company does. There are plenty of innovative tools and programs in the American education system, but the schools with the highest need, >> p6 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MARCH 10–16, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com
