Imagine how you learned best while in school, or how you best retain and utilize knowledge in your life today. The idea of hands on learning in education is not a new concept; yet through language, writing and drawing, we’ve made learning highly visual and auditory. These are great tools and allow for a lot of information to be passed along to large numbers of people in a short amount of time. Many aspects of these ways of teaching do not require hands on approach yet can still be effective, and certainly efficient. You might feel, however, from your own personal experience that hands on learning helps you retain many practices more effectively than sitting through a lecture. For writing and language skills, conventional approaches to teaching largely are the most pragmatic, but what about for areas like Science and Engineering?


STEM based learning; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, is measurably more effective with an applied approach. This means that when adding apples to oranges, it helps to actually use apples and oranges rather than just saying or writing numbers. The problem is, fruit rots and plastic apples and oranges take up a lot of space on a classroom shelf. And of course it is more expensive the more elaborate applied learning gets. Luckily, emerging immersive tech like Virtual and Augmented Reality can act as a bridge between traditional conventional ways of teaching and applied hands on learning which is a tenet of STEM based education.

At MXTreality we have had opportunities to create molecular sized plant cells and human hearts in AR, exploration throughout the earth and beyond in VR, and many more solutions that are centered around learning through immersive tech.


TERC; a non-profit comprised of teams of math and science education and research experts dedicated to innovation and creative problem solving are at the forefront of utilizing the latest in tech to assist in educational learning. Through our shared interest in these areas, we came together with game creation team Edge at TERC to create a learning based game that educates students about space exploration, scientific concepts, and more, all related to the 6th moon of Jupiter; Europa.

Europa is a hot topic among the scientific community and the mainstream is impressively familiar with the icy world as a result. There is growing interest in the moon due to theories that Europa almost certainly contains water filled oceans beneath its icy surface and along with other factors makes it what many agree is the most likely place in the solar system other than Earth to facilitate conditions for life.

We cannot yet send students to visit Europa, yet virtually, the possibilities are endless. Edge at TERC understood this concept and decided that they wanted the ability to utilize Europa’s vast sources of curiosity. Working with them we at MXTreality created a gamified experience to bring students to Europa to explore a futuristic research facility.