Design Challenges in Youth-Safe VR Environments

After many years of using VR environments in graduate classes, and teaching others how to create these environments within graduate courses, I will be designing pre-developed VR environments for youth, in K-12 schools and in other youth-oriented organizations. I plan to work with the affordances such as though now coming available through Kitely’s Virtual Private Networks to create a youth-safe interface and a practical registration system, and, very importantly quasi-designed environments that simplifies development while leaving flexibility and optimization by the school or organization itself.

I am working through design considerations for developing the VR interface but also for providing sufficient scaffolding so that other adult instructors will know how to use these spaces effectively with sound pedagogical principles so they can work within the significant advantage that VR can bring to geographically distant ways of instructing youth.