How can Telenet The Park spark adolescents' interest in VR to increase their engagement with the business activities of Telenet The Park?

|Recap previous phases|

Last pahse was concluded with the presentation of 3 possible solutions for this challenge:

1. Rent Your Reality

2. Out of The Park

3. Co-Creation Lab

At the request of our challenger, Telenet The Park, we combined the first and last solution, since these projects don't have to be mutually exclusive. After some thought, we decided that the best way to combine 'Rent Your reality' and 'Co-Creation Lab' is by creating a platform, 'EduHub'. On this platform students will be able to both create and consult educational VR content.

This platform is meant to support both students and teachers to reach learning objectives, while also focusing on innovation and new skills. Therefore, it is important that EduHub contains the possibility to view metrics and progress related to the lessons and projects of students. These metrics should allow teachers to see where students are struggling so they can help their students in a more targeted way.

The results of the survey and conducted think aloud protocols from 'Phase 2' show that the students find 'quality content' very important when it comes to 'educational VR content'. This implies that:

1. The content published on the platform by Telenet The Park should be in the native language of the students to avoid the language barrier when learning a course.

2. The content should be user-friendly and easy to navigate.

3. The published content should add value and illustrate the extra benefits VR can offer, such as 'overcoming the limitations of reality' (e.g. schools that practice gardening can only cut a tree once, but in VR they can practice as much as needed).

|Prototype + validation|

As one of the final tangibles of this challenge, we have decided to create a digital prototype of our platform in Figma. More information and a detailed description of each screen we prototyped can be found in our public report under section 3.2.

To make sure we were on the right track, we validated our prototype with different schools and companies by conducting 10 interviews and cognitive walkthroughs of our platform, asking and answering many questions, and receiving valuable feedback in return.

The different schools, as well as the industry experts from companies like Dexr, SupportSquare and One Bonsai have expressed their interest and enthusiasm, and confirmed the major potential of this platform, especially when the above criteria would be taken into account.

|Feedback on our platform prototype|

To further develop the prototype of our educational VR platform, the most important element to keep in mind is all the feedback we received so far and will receive from the different parties about the platform, such as:

• The proposed platform is technically feasible.
• It’s better to make the platform web-based.
• Integration with Unity is possible, but not necessary.
• One of the major constraints is the concrete distinction we’ll have to make between the groups who will use the platform (school/teacher/student) and how we will integrate this into our platform
• Make sure there are school environment integrations with the platform such as Smartschool login.
• Based on the different accounts/user groups that will use our platform, we will have to adapt the page structure and lay-out within our platform, adapt and elaborate the pages we currently have, and create new pages to complete our platform for every kind of user.

The biggest constraint we currently have is also our biggest focus, namely, the different users groups & how we can include and implement this distinction on our platform. We will have to decide what the best way is to tackle this. For that, we will continue to leverage feedback from experts and schools, and adapt our prototype accordingly.

|Literature review and demographics from Telenet The Park|

The main goal, stated in the beginning by our challenger was to attract more first-time users to experience VR at one of the Telenet The Park locations. Since we found this a rather broad request, we started our challenge by conducting a literature review. In this research we found that young people generally show more willingness to try VR applications. In addition, we also found that VR implementation in education is becoming increasingly important within the VR sector. Because of the various additional benefits that VR use offers in education, there are many opportunities in this area.

During the previous phases, we also received a limited set of demographic data from Telenet The Park. Because there is not yet as much data on visitors, and certainly not on non-visitors, it is difficult for Telenet The Park to adjust its offerings to get non-users to The Park. Despite that, we were able to formulate some insights based on that data, such as the fact that young people between the ages of 16-20 make up only a smaller proportion of visitors to The Park. This was not consistent with the results we found in the literature review.

|Survey|

These were sufficient reasons for us to conduct our research among 16-20 year olds in high schools. Our survey showed that the factors 'habit' and 'attitude', from the UTAUT2 model on which our research is based, were significant in both contexts (entertainment VR and VR for education). Since the desk research told us that VR in education was an interesting track within the sector of VR, we decided to build on that and develop our ideas in the context 'VR for education'.

|Ideation Bootcamp|

The development of concrete ideas happened during the Ideation Bootcamp. We drew up various requirements and used these to develop concrete ideas using the Lotus Blossom and the Scenarios of Use technique. In the end we decided on 3 solutions where the common theme is that VR has to get to the people before the people go to VR. So, the 3 possible solutions, based on the determined requirements (Time and Money, Content, Guidance, Location, Hardware, Multi-person, Government, Schools, User and Branding) that we propose are:

1. Rent Your Reality

2. Out of The Park

3. Co-Creation Lab

• Involve different parties in user research (schools, teachers, developers, companies,...) and include them in the prototyping by asking them about their experiences, struggles, barriers,...
• Create a prototype of the platform implementing (some of the) elements pointed out by the different stakeholders.
• Make sure there is a link between the content at Telenet The Park and what students will create in the schools.
• Think in the direction of a business model for Telenet The Park where we put all elements of our idea together.
  

|Redefining the target group|

In the last phase, the research question of this challenge was: 'What are the main drivers and thresholds for 'children' to use VR?

In the beginning, the focus of this challenge was aimed at children. The age range was not specifically defined yet since 'children' were considered everyone between 6-18 years old. Due to a number of reasons that will be explained below, this group has been redefined to 'adolescents' ranging from 16 to 20 years old.

Reason 1:

The demographic data from Telenet The Park states that the age range 16-25 is only the third-largest group of visitors. However, the conducted literature review argues that adolescents are more accepting of new technologies and are more inclined to try and adopt new technologies such as VR.

A study from Horvath (2021) suggest that VR helps students better understand their course materials. This study showed that students who learned about a subject in VR scored 20% higher than students who studied through traditional means. Boredom and procrastination, however, lead to opposite outcomes and result in decreased academic achievement. Macklem (2014) investigated these effects and discovered that half of the high school students in suffer from boredom every day. With these numbers in mind, it is interesting to see if new technologies, such as VR, can offer a solution in favor of the student. In a study from Campos et al. (2022) students evaluated VR tools as having a positive impact on their course contents learning. The study found VR tools especially valuable to teach more complex study materials.Using VR can also expand learning opportunities after a field trip and helps to re-live it. This seemed beneficial for the learning experience when used complementarily and not as a substitute of the excursions (Han, 2020; Wu et al., 2013).

This literature shows the willingness of students to try and use VR as a part of their education, but does't explain why they are holding back to try out the innovation. Trying to discover why this mismatch exists could also show what the thresholds are for adolescents to use VR.

Reason 2:

Because of time constraints and practical considerations regarding informed consent it was evident to choose the age range 16 to 20 years old.

From the age of 16, parents don't need to give consent for their children & students can therefore give their own consent to participate in the study. To be able to conduct the study in a short period of time, this seemed to be the best approach.

Reason 3:

The decision was made to survey students from the 'third grade' in Flemish high schools. That means the 5th years, 6th year and in some cases the 7th year. This automatically includes students ages 16 to 20 years old in the sample.

The decision could be made to choose students from 16 to 18 years old, but in this case we would be assuming that there are no older students than 18 in their last years of high school. To avoid excluding students older than 18 in their last years in high school, we broadened the age range of our research.

|Reasearch results (survey + think aloud protocol) summarized using 2 peronas|

Now that it is clarified why the target audience has been redefined since last phase, we can answer the question: "What are the main drivers and thresholds for adolescents (16-20 years old) to use VR?".

We summarize the insights of the survey and the conducted think aloud protocols into 2 personas, one for students surveyed and interviewed about VR for entertainment, and one persona for students surveyed and interviewed about educational VR in a school context.

The entertainment-oriented persona

This persona (17 year old male) doesn't have much experience or knowlege of VR, but is curious about the many gaming possibilities VR could offer. He would play with VR in his free time, if it were more accessible to him. He associates VR with entertainment, relaxation, connection to others, and personal development. He values the challenge some VR games bring: these should of course not be too easy, or he would quickly lose interest. Overall it is clear that this persona, and others like him, lack the habit of using VR, simply because they don't have access to the technology. Factors such as the price of the equipment, play a huge role and are part of the thresholds stopping adolescents to explore this new technology.

The education-oriented persona

This persona (17 year old female) believes that for certain learning subjects, like chemistry, VR could give her a benefit over traditional learning. Accoding to her, VR allows for realistic immersion where you can, for example, mix chemicals and see how they will react. No need for expensive school labs, this application can be used in school or at home. This persona, however, experiences certain points of pain. Here too, the high cost of buying a VR headset is a threshold. The elevated price implies that many adolescents haven't used educational VR, which in turn, results in a lack of habit. For this persona, the quality of the content is very important. Many VR applications are only available in certain languages, which forms a considerable language barrier that can cause problems for it's users learning the course material. Problems may also arise during initial use, according to this persona, making it all the more important to ensure that the content is user-friendly and the interface easy to operate.

Based on the two factors (attitude & habit) that stood out from the study, we can move on to the next phase and come up with possible solutions to create a tangible.

For this, we want to build upon our research where 'habit' has proven to be the most important factor.

We want adolescents to develop a 'habit' regarding the use of VR. By integrating VR into a school context, we hope this will allow us, with the help of Telenet The Park, to create awareness among adolescents about the possibilities of VR and make VR more widely accessible to the general public.