Week 5: Introduction And Update On Project

Hello! My name is Rithik Puli, commonly known as Rit P in the streets. Like many folks, when I first found out about the Metaverse, I thought it was nothing more than a gimmick used primarily for gaming and entertainment. It wasn’t until I spent 6 months doing actual research on the latest innovations in the Metaverse and the various applications of the Metaverse that I realized that the Metaverse truly was the future, and that it was applicable in nearly every sector. Through my research, I found that companies in all sorts of sectors like travel, retail, healthcare, and fitness are investing tens of billions of dollars into the Metaverse. The Metaverse is being used extensively by companies to optimize design processes, make training more efficient, make communication and collaboration seamless and easier than ever, and for many other things. The more research I conducted, the more I became convinced that not only is the Metaverse the future, but it’s going to become a staple in nearly every part of our lives. After conducting research about the Metaverse in nearly 10 sectors for 6 months, I wondered where else the Metaverse could be heavily instituted. That’s when I began AP Research.

So I had the great idea of looking into the application of the Metaverse into Education. Education was one of the areas I conducted very little research on, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to learn more about the Metaverse and its potential applications in an area I knew little about in education. My research aimed to look particularly at how Extended Reality (XR) can effectively be integrated into the pre-existing K-12 curriculum. I chose this line of inquiry in particular, because when I did a literature review of pre-existing studies in this area, what I found was that several of the leading studies identified integration of XR technology into the pre-existing curriculum as an area that needs more research. Therefore, I decided to do just that.

I decided to conduct a case study looking at various implementations of XR technologies in education. I will look at implementations that had positive effects on student performance and implementations that had negative/no effects on student performance. Then I will try to extrapolate common conditions in different implementations that led to a positive and negative outcome. Once I have the conditions that led to a successful and unsuccessful implementation of XR technology, I plan on providing a plan for schools to use in the future to successfully integrate XR into their pre-existing curriculum.

This past week, I solidified the first couple sections of my paper and presentation (Intro/Background, Literature Review, and Methodology). I am currently working on collecting my data from all the different cases I have to analyze. I’m having to analyze 7-8 different implementations of XR (cases) in total. The vast majority of them are implementations where implementing XR led to a tremendous positive impact on student performance. One of the challenges that I hope to overcome, is to find a couple more cases where implementations of XR had a negative or no effect on student performance. I have a couple cases, but not nearly close to the amount of positive cases I can cite. I plan on spending this week, to find a couple more cases where implementations of XR had a negative/no effect on student performance, and to finish up all my data collection (most of which is qualitative). Next week, I hope to really dive deep into my data and find patterns and commonalities between positive implementations of XR and negative implementations of XR.

Between my research project, following the NBA playoffs, and business/investing shenanigans, I have a busy week ahead of me. I’ll check back in with y’all in exactly one week.

Rithik Puli