Unfair Park from p4 often in minority or poor communities, don’t get the basic resources they need, let alone the latest innovations in education, she said. “Those schools have not had the best teachers,” Shead said. “They haven’t had the best resources or these innovative programs and practices that allow the minority low- income students in those districts to be ex- posed to all the great things in the world and ultimately get inspired and educated to re- ally succeed at the same level of wealthier school districts.” DISD is an anomaly in that it's been able to provide some of these programs to stu- dents with the highest need. “But, they shouldn’t be an anomaly,” she said. Shead said they’re taking consumer tech- nology and bringing it into the classroom. “That’s something we feel education has failed at doing for years,” she said. They’re also trying to bring “workplace learning” into core subjects. STEMuli started by building a platform to connect corporate mentors to high school students in public schools. DISD has a pro- gram called PTECH, pathways to technol- ogy, early college high school, that teams high schools with industry partners from companies like American Airlines, South- west, IBM and others. “But one thing we recognized early is that it was very difficult for employees at Microsoft, just as an example, to leave work and get into the classroom,” Shead said. “So, our first mission was, well before the pan- demic, starting in 2016, we wanted to de- velop a platform that could connect these high school students to these virtual men- tors and internships in order to get them better prepared for life after high school.” Students on the platform went on to earn $1.7 million from summer internships, Shead said. The program also saw increases in the number of DISD graduates who com- pleted post-secondary degrees six years af- ter graduation. DISD was STEMuli’s first major contract in 2016. Since then, the company has started working with Garland ISD, Fort Worth ISD, San Antonio school districts and some school districts on the East Coast. Then the pandemic hit. Before this, Shead had worked with the chief technology officer in DISD to create the district’s “Future of Learning Plan.” “That learning plan was essentially sup- posed to say, ‘If we want students to have these learning outcomes, then here’s the technology they need, and here’s what the infrastructure of our buildings need to look like,’” Shead said. A three-year plan was created to provide every DISD elementary, middle and high school student “one-to-one devices.” One thing Shead was tasked with was community engagement for the plan. “I told them, ‘Look, you all may not know this, but there are many people in our Dallas commu- nity who do not have Wi-Fi at home,’” she said. Shead suggested the district poll DISD families to see who needs internet access. “But the question that we all asked our- 66 selves was, what happens after you get them connected online?” Shead recalled. like. They first looked at Minecraft, Fortnite and The Sims. “What we started to study was the longevity that these games had in the marketplace and the engagement that occurred in the marketplace because of these games,” Shead said. For example, Minecraft has been one of the games with the most longevity and en- gagement across many demographics. The game, first made public in 2009, uses blocky, LEGO-like graphics that are crude by to- day’s videogame standards, but it allows us- ers wide freedom to essentially create their own virtual lives by building, socializing and, if they like, fighting. Fortnite, a game that started as a “battle royale” format in which players fight one another for survival, has evolved into a mas- sive and more sociable world, one with tre- mendous engagement, but users needed a better internet connection because it’s more visually complex than Minecraft. Minecraft graphics are easier for stu- dents to access because they don’t demand as much internet speed or computing power. Another thing Minecraft taught them, Shead said, “is that people love being able to build and destroy things in these worlds.” So, they built a world where students could do just that. They also looked into a company called RaiseMe, whose platform lets users to earn “microscholarships.” This allows students to earn money toward college tuition through their academic achievements. Shead’s company wanted to understand Between March 18 and June 1, 2020, the STEMuli team built a virtual platform on top of the PTECH program and launched it for all DISD summer programs. “So, any student who either was entering into some of these new high schools or was taking any dual credit courses over that summer utilized our platform,” Shead said. They learned that educators were using some 20 different applications to do simple tasks like grading, taking attendance and re- ceiving feedback. So, they created an operat- ing environment where all these things could be done in the same place. Eventually, they had all those educator tasks in one system. They had all the stu- dents in the same “virtual classroom,” which was more like a Zoom meeting. But, they weren’t seeing the student engagement they needed. “Just because students are con- nected all in one place does not mean they’re engaged in the classroom,” Shead said. “It’s actually just the opposite.” Mike Morath, Texas’ education commis- sioner, has said the biggest problem facing Texas is learning loss caused by the pan- demic. “He quantifies that by saying students who are in education systems today in Texas have lost over a trillion dollars worth of lifetime earning potential because of the learning loss suffered from the pandemic,” Shead said. Educators needed to change that and boost engagement as much as possible. Sean Brinkman, the chief technology of- ficer of Austin ISD who used to work for DISD, called Shead and said: “If y’all are looking to do something that nobody in the STEMuli founder and CEO Taylor Shead Kathy Tran world has done, then try to build school into a video game.” “That was our green light,” Shead said. In the beginning of the pandemic, schools had to set up distribution centers for students to pick up laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots. DISD was also providing food at home for students. “Sometimes for these families, it was the first time a computer or Wi-Fi had ever been in their home,” Shead said. “All of a sudden, you’re having parents who may or may not speak English, who may or may not have used a computer before, having to figure out how to support their learners getting online.” She said the process was especially diffi- cult for students who couldn’t read yet. “In a positive note, the entire educator workforce was upskilled in a matter of months, having to learn how to implement technology and use it to instruct class- rooms,” she said. The instruction wasn’t always the most interactive. “Oftentimes what you would have happen is you would have kids who completely checked out of school, who hadn’t been online all week, or all month,” she said. “Complete lack of engagement, and really, accountability.” They thought making the learning expe- rience more like a video game could change this. What they’ve seen so far from their platform is more engagement from the stu- dents, Shead said. They researched games to figure out what they wanted their metaverse to look “engagement loop,” “applied game mechan- ics” and how they can apply it to education. They asked themselves: “What are the behaviors that lead to higher retention of learning? What are the behaviors, character traits and values that if a student has will carry them through the rest of their lives? And we wanted to incentivize students to do those things.” They also studied Roblox, a virtual world that allows elementary, middle and high school students to work together and build games that they can then sell to other kids. “There are kids on Roblox that are making like tens of thousands of dollars a year,” Shead said. “Instead of just building this one world for us in Dallas or for all the school districts we want to serve, why don’t we cre- ate a way where students, teachers, textbook publishers, corporate partners, anyone, can build their own world within our world?” Then, they can share those worlds and learning experiences with others. “With some applications, they’re like, ‘We’re going to make all this game-based content,’” Shead said. “But if you were to try and do that for all of K-12 or all of edu- cation, you’re spending hundreds of mil- lions of dollars. We’re investing $15 million into building this world-building tool, and we’re going to open it up so students are now building learning experiences for other students. We’re just going to invite as many people into our world as possible to build their own metaverse of learning within ours.” Of course, these different video games and online communities STEMuli looked into aren't perfect. The BBC recently published a story called "Roblox: The children's game with a sex problem," which detailed >> p8 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.comdallasobserver.com
