Call for Participation

Environmental education faces an engagement gap: learners struggle to connect emotionally with ecological phenomena occurring far from their lived experience. This position paper proposes The Monarch Butterfly Tour, an interactive 3D educational application that follows Momo, a monarch butterfly, on her 4,000-kilometer mi- gration from the United States to central Mexico. The application transforms scientific data into a click-to-explore learning experi- ence centered on a single character, reflecting the biological reality of the Methuselah generation — the migratory cohort that com- pletes the full southward journey in one lifetime. By supporting both VR-based immersive interaction and desktop-based point-and- click exploration, the framework offers flexible deployment across diverse educational contexts. This paper argues that placing a single character at the center of an ecological simulation creates a peda- gogical anchor for emotional engagement, and that flexible modal- ity (VR/desktop) broadens accessibility without sacrificing learning depth. This position paper presents the design framework and ar- gues that its dual-modality design process serves as a reproducible curriculum case study for teaching the transition from traditional HCI to immersive 3D interactions in XR education.

XR design education requires learners to develop spatial, embodied, and experiential ways of thinking that are not always supported by software-first instruction. This position paper explores hula hoops as low-cost pedagogical artifacts for introducing selected XR design concepts through bodily movement and visual-spatial demonstra- tion. We present a hoop-based framework that identifies relevant XR concepts across Environment Design, Interaction and Navigation Design, and Experience Design; defines broad hoop activity families; and maps selected activities to learning outcomes in XR design. The mappings are classified through four criteria: embodiment, visual- ization, spatial manipulability, and XR design transferability. Rather than presenting an evaluated teaching method, the paper contributes a conceptual framework and research agenda for using play-based physical artifacts to support novice XR designers in reasoning about spatial understanding and spatial reasoning, coordinate systems, embodied interaction, spatial interfaces, navigation, attention, and perception.

Grounded in creative learning and culturally responsive computing, this case study investigates the use of virtual reality (VR) co- creation as a meaningful context for K-12 students' engagement with spatial computing. Fifth through eighth grade students (n = 68) learned about the history of hip-hop and collaboratively built VR music video sets centered on messages they wanted to share. Findings suggest that this intervention significantly increased stu- dents' interest in pursuing technology careers and their motivation to make a difference in their communities. Additionally, it helped elicit a range of VR design ideas grounded in students' values, af- firmations, and issues they cared about. We conclude by discussing the affective and creative affordances of this approach. We also dis- cuss considerations for integrating VR co-creation into the class- room, including how asymmetric access to devices and tools may help scaffold collaboration.

We report a second iteration of a one-week XR block seminar structured as a hackathon, in which HCI students (N=14, four teams) co-designed XR prototypes with neurodivergent adults (N=3, care takers N=2) from Lebenshilfe Berlin e.V.1 and PIKSL e.V.2. Draw- ing on student feedback from the first iteration, the seminar was extended to a Wednesday-to-Wednesday format (eight days), con- crete team-specific design themes were introduced, and a structured expert review phase was added prior to the final user testing session with neurodivergent participants. Expert review, which was con- ducted by the lecturer and three teaching assistants, provided early feedback that allowed students to refine accessibility and interaction design before participants engaged with the prototypes on the final day. The Lebenshilfe team reported the collaboration as notice- ably more relaxed than the previous iteration, attributing this to the longer onboarding process, increased mutual familiarity, and better- scoped design themes. Qualitative findings from student and teach- ing reflections, and a closing discussion point to improved proto- typing stability, stronger early accessibility integration, and more confident participant interaction. We discuss how the interplay be- tween expert review and end-user co-design can be productively structured in time-constrained teaching formats.

Designing an “Advanced XR Development” course within a master's program in XR presents unique challenges, as students al- ready develop self-contained artifacts through multiple project- based courses covering topics such as interaction techniques, novel immersive interfaces, and immersive analytics. However, an anal- ysis of the program structure reveals a critical gap: limited atten- tion is given to integrating individual XR components into large, complex systems. We argue that this integration gap represents a key opportunity for advanced XR education. This paper explores how AI-assisted development (vibe coding) can reshape XR educa- tion by lowering implementation barriers and shifting the learning focus from building isolated components toward higher-level cap- stone competencies, including system design, integration, debug- ging, and evaluation. We propose the design of an “Advanced XR Development” course, presenting its learning objectives, teaching activities, and assessments. Rather than offering a finalized cur- riculum model, we position this work as a provocation for the com- munity to discuss.

Physical objects can be powerful anchors for children's AR authoring because they make spatial interaction concrete: learners can see, move around, and program against objects in their own environ- ment. Building on constructionist tools such as Scratch and Capy- bara, we present an object-aware mobile augmented reality proto- type that explores how everyday objects can become programmable targets for playful character-object interactions. In the prototype, learners place animated characters in an AR scene, detect everyday objects such as cups, apples, and bottles, and transform those detec- tions into simple interactable three-dimensional proxies. Characters can then perform simple behaviors such as jumping onto, jumping over, or bouncing off these object proxies. The system intentionally uses lightweight geometry and visible interaction rules rather than high-fidelity reconstruction, making perception, anchoring, scale, collision, and event-driven behavior easier to reason about. This paper describes the design motivation, system architecture, interac- tion model, and planned classroom-oriented evaluation of the pro- totype as a low-barrier way to connect visual programming ideas with physical-world AR interaction.

Extended Reality (XR) is increasingly adopted in education to support immersive and experiential learning. However, educators often lack structured guidance for designing XR learning experiences that align pedagogical objectives with technological and organizational considerations. Existing frameworks primarily describe the rela- tionships between these elements but provide limited support for the instructional design process. This paper operationalizes the XR- MOT framework by proposing a decision-driven workflow for XR instructional design. The workflow introduces the educational role of XR as the first design decision, distinguishing between teaching using XR and teaching XR, before guiding educators through ed- ucational needs analysis, learning objective definition, pedagogical design, XR learning experience design, and Management of Tech- nology (MOT) considerations. A History of Architecture course is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed workflow, il- lustrating how instructional decisions systematically progress from educational goals to sustainable XR implementation. The proposed workflow extends the conceptual XR-MOT framework by provid- ing practical guidance for educators and instructional designers while promoting pedagogy-driven, sustainable XR integration in education.

Developing a deep conceptual understanding of physics phenomena is essential for engineering students to transfer their knowledge across different domains. However, teaching abstract and invisible concepts, such as fluid dynamics, that cannot be directly observed in the physical world, remains challenging. Virtual Reality (VR) offers new opportunities to support learning by enabling interactive visualizations that make invisible physical processes observable. Despite this potential, the use of VR in STEM education remains relatively limited due to the high cost and technical expertise re- quired for development. Consequently, it remains unclear whether the benefits of incorporating VR into instruction justify these costs, creating a need to evaluate whether VR can improve conceptual un- derstanding. This study investigates the effectiveness of VR as a supplemen- tary tool for teaching fluid dynamics, a complex and non-intuitive physics phenomenon that is difficult to observe directly. To evaluate this, we conducted a between-subjects study with 31 participants comparing two instructional conditions: traditional slide-based in- struction and slides supplemented with a VR experience. Partici- pants' conceptual understanding was assessed using a comprehen- sion quiz. Our findings revealed that participants who experienced only traditional teaching content outperformed those who experi- enced the additional VR-based learning module.