Virtual reality helps students with functional skills

An accidental fire this summer damaged the kitchen Skyline High School uses to teach life skills to students who receive special education services, and while repair work was being completed, Assistant Principal Sonja Nix had to get creative to find a way to help her teachers impart those skills without a kitchen.

She found the answer in virtual reality.

With the use of computer programs that Nix and the SPED teachers have repurposed and goggles that have been obtained from other programs that were no longer using them students in Vashti Mbah’s class are following recipes, cutting and measuring ingredients, mixing them and cooking, just like they would in a real kitchen.

“We partner with the culinary arts pathway to use their kitchen, but if the students have a catering event coming up, we can’t use it,” she said. “But we have to keep teaching these skills. This is a great way to do it. The students have really taken to it.”

Cooking is not the only life skill where virtual reality is used to teach. Students in Caroline Gichangi’s functional life skills class get to drive using computers and programs that have been repurposed from other areas in the high school thanks to Nix’s efforts. And while they are not likely to be driving a car in reality, the programs are reinforcing other lessons and teaching them social skills.

“Kids are so used to interacting with phones and technology that this makes it so much easier,” Gichangi said. “Even those who don’t have reading skills can interact and advance to have a functional life. As they interact with each other.”

The students in her class show their obvious enjoyment while using the computer programs, which has helped them be more open and acquire greater communication skills, she said.

Nix, who is the assistant principal over special education and discipline, was working on her doctoral program going through an educational technology course when she had the idea that technology—specifically augmented virtual reality—could be helpful in special education classes. Skyline, Dallas ISD’s largest high school, has more than 300 students receiving special education services and about 80 of them are in functional skills classrooms. As far as Nix knows, Skyline is the first program to use virtual reality with SPED students in this way.

Unfortunately, this technology is not normally part of life skills classes so there was no budget for it . Because it was needed at the moment, Nix begged and borrowed from other programs that were not using the computers, goggles, programs, etc., and got the students to try them out.

“The kids found a bunch of apps we didn’t know we had but we need to update the modules,” Nix said. “We have been incorporating the technology into the lesson plans. It has been a great success. They are acquiring 21st century skills.”

Nix hopes that the success shown this year can lead to more support for technology upgrades—both equipment and software—so more students in functional skills classes can benefit from them. She also hopes that other high school life skills classes will see how virtual reality can help students and adopt it, as well. 

“I would like to visit other campuses and talk to them about how this has made a difference for our students, and how they can replicate it,” Nix said. “We are taking the district’s mission to educate all students for success seriously.”