Young Enterprise NI has teamed up with the Techies in Residence programme to deliver a VR project that promotes STEM to young students.
The education and employability team at Young Enterprise Northern Ireland has had a tough job this year introducing school aged students to STEM due to the pandemic. With learning going digital and the team aiming to engage with at least 30,000 primary and post-primary students this year, the group decided to go digital with their own approach.
The team signed up for the 2020-21 Techies in Residence programme run by the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, which matches organisations up with tech developers to explore digital solutions for real social problems. The team was paired up with Richard Walsh from Zoo Creative back in December, and has produced some interesting solutions.
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The group together developed a Virtual Reality experience called "Brakeout" designed to help students work as a team to solve problems. One team member wears a VR headset and sees the challenge and their teammates have to guide them using information provided. The exercise is designed to teach students of all ages to solve problems as a team.
Young Enterprise Northern Ireland's Development Manager Barbara Edgar commented:"Our challenge lay in the fact that exposure to potential STEM careers is the remit of a school’s careers team. If the team is strong and sufficiently resourced that works really well. Where they’re not, it means the young people have no reference point and don’t think STEM subjects are relevant to them. It can be a real challenge in some schools, especially all-girls schools, so our aim is to help them consider science as an option."
Source: Written based on press release
