Education
Yet before we tell you how, a short lesson about fish. (We're Menagerie. We like cute animals.) Groups of fish are not called schools—despite what your teacher told you. If the fish are just milling around, chatting and blubbing, they're actually called shoals. (Write this down, pupil, there will be a test later. Shoal.) However, when fish all get moving in the same direction, then that's called schooling. We believe a lot of today's educational system is just shoaling. Kids slumping around, bored, disengaged, waiting for the next text. These children are not a team, they're just small humans facing the same direction: sometimes toward a chalkboard, sometimes toward a screen. Our tools for creating online community ecosystems can help kids create teams to organize their learning. As part of connected communities, they can lead and teach one another, design solutions on their own, and build their knowledge in a permanent way that can be visible on a blockchain. The teacher becomes more like a coach, coordinating their efforts. Menagerie can turn shoaling into schooling. One way we turn shoaling into schooling? Menagerie integrates with the metaverse. The metaverse is a virtual, 3D world. Students enter the metaverse through VR goggles or regular internet screens. We believe the metaverse can take over 70 percent of remote and in-person learning.
How metaverse platforms upgrade student learning
Construct a life-like classroom in virtual space
Teachers create rooms for whatever environment they want. There are few limits in the metaverse. Students can choose avatars that look like themselves. This immersive experience draws students in, making them more invested in learning and growing.
Turn learning into a game
The metaverse has found its most widespread adoption with video games. Schools can tap into that tech and create educational games. Gamification is a tried-and-true way to convey knowledge. Learning becomes enjoyable. Problem-solving is a 3D experience that resembles a video game.
Enhance interactions between students
In today's online classrooms, connected via Zoom or Google Meet, communication isn't easy. Everyone stares at the same screen, and interaction happens through impersonal chat boxes. A sense of stuckness or aloneness can set in. Students turn off their cameras and zone out. In the metaverse, however, students and teachers can face each other. Folks can turn their heads to "see" each other. Metaverse designers can build virtual rooms where students or teachers gather for small-group discussions that feel remarkably lifelike. Students can bounce ideas off each other, critique each other's writing, and more. Connections flourish. Students keep their heads in the game.
Put students into immersive realities
Wearing VR goggles, students can be transported to any corner of the universe their teachers want to take them, such as simulations that engage them and enhance their learning. For example, students could be transported to the Battle of Waterloo to watch the armies rumble, or to the surface of Titan to watch the ice volcanoes spew, or be given 3D representations of mechanical objects to see the principles of physics at work. Or travel to Mars to experience the virtual conditions there and to learn what it would mean to have to live in a restricting environment like Mars.