The Educational Gaming Environments (EdGE) group at TERC is a team of educators, designers, and researchers who design and study digital games and environments to learn how to engage all learners in STEM, especially those who are “falling through the cracks.”
For UniVRsal Access, EdGE is co-designing a STEM-based virtual reality (VR) game, Europa Prime, with learners who have sensory, attention, and/or social differences, and researching how VR can be used to increase access to and broaden participation in informal STEM education, especially for neurodivergent learners.
In a futuristic space station on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, players are tasked with completing STEM-based puzzles, fixing the station, and communicating with the alien life found in the icy moon’s subsurface ocean.
The game, co-designed by and with neurodivergent learners from Landmark College in Vermont, is sensory and attention friendly, with developmental choices and in-game controls that minimize issues such as motion sickness, allow players to easily adjust visual, audio, and other settings, subtly guide players, and present fun and interesting STEM-based challenges. Other assets, including augmented reality (AR) experiences, videos, and 360-degree images, are also available for exploration.
In addition, EdGE is co-designing, developing, and researching a maker curriculum, called NeuroVivid, aimed at strengthening the future STEM workforce by engaging neurodiverse middle schoolers around EEG headsets to understand and interact with their own brain activity.