Virtual reality (VR) applications hold great potential to create cultural experiences, yet they often focus on cultural heritage preservation incorporating entertainment rather than learning aspects.This study, embedded within a larger project of digitalising local traditional practices in VR, explored co-designing learning supports with primary school learners.Adopting a participatory design approach, learners participated in co-design sessions to create supports for a previously developed VR experience depicting a nomadic community's hunting process.Based on their designs, two prototypes were developed: a non-player character and a poster-board guide.Both were evaluated by the learners, and further design suggestions were gathered.The study offers insights into personalised learning experiences as envisioned by learners, highlighting the need for autonomy and agency, the dissonance between learners' preferences and authentic cultural knowledge transmission practices, as well as their reliance on familiar technological features.

Existing communication technologies have displayed a lack of affordances in supporting social-emotional connections, which is of particular interest in educational settings. We are therefore developing a live sensory immersive 3D video technology, built on a prior developed platform. Pilot trials in a Finnish school have yielded promising findings. We continue to advance the state-of-the-art platform in parallel with regards to 3D capture quality and data compression algorithms. Current developments entail joint investigations and evaluations of affordances to support emotional, social, motivational, and achievement impacts with learners and teachers from a Namibian and Finnish school. Participants can experience ”remote presence” wearing the hololens 2 while others are live streamed from another country captured by two cameras.

We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

An increasing trend of digitally enhancing learning provides unique opportunities to expand from local to global learning environments. However, current technologies and educational approaches do not adequately support creative communication and learning for primary school learners across the globe. We maintain that it is important to promote agentic engagement amongst learners by involving them in the design of their own digitally enhanced learning environment. In this study, we connected ten learners from a Namibian and a Finnish school in virtual communications to co-design an interactive map game. Following a research through design approach, we share a detailed account of the case study in which we facilitated a distributed co-design process, using Skype, a custom made VR environment, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We reflect on the co-design sessions, focusing on communication and the design concept evolution contributing to distributed co-design methods and techniques not only for the design community but also as an agentic learning process that could be incorporated into formal learning environments. With a paucity of existing empirical work of geographically distributed co-design with children, our case study provides an empirical foundation pointing at critical issues to be further investigated such as multilingual design, social cohesion, facilitation roles, technologies, design breadcrumbs, negotiations and learner’s pride.

One design endeavor we pursue in a long-term research and co-design project is the creation of a 3D visualization interface for an indigenous knowledge (IK) management system with rural dwellers of Herero ethnicity in Namibia. Evaluations of earlier prototypes and theories on cultural differences in perception led us to further investigate the suitability of different perspectives of view for the given user group. Through a combination of drawing sessions, design discussions and a high-fidelity technology probe we explored the visual perceptions and preferences of community members; specifically focusing on representation and recognition of objects and places in their everyday environment. We report how the findings from the study have informed design decisions for our particular system while also suggesting that certain viewing angles for 3D visualizations could be more suitable for rural dwellers in general and the collaborating community in specific.