Lennox French, a student at Lexington Senior High School in North: The wider industry impact

French’s journey started in the Spark Lab at Lexington Senior High School, where students are encouraged to explore emerging technologies and to build ideas that have real-world applications.

Therefore, the unit satisfies SparkNC’s alignment requirements for aggregation to course credit. A high school student’s vision of a virtual classroom is about to go far beyond the walls where it started. Lennox French, a student at Lexington Senior High School in North Carolina, has been chosen to develop and implement a virtual-reality learning unit that could soon be available to students across the state. The project is a first for SparkNC, making French the first student in the program’s history to create a unit for its statewide platform, states the school website report. The department has determined Creating Digital Spaces in VR conforms to the state’s computer science standards. That approval is a big step in turning French’s student project into an educational tool with statewide importance. For Garland Beamer, a Spark Lab leader at Lexington Senior High School, the decision is also a landmark step for the school and its student innovation program.

The proposed course had to be reviewed by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction before the unit could continue.

French’s journey started in the Spark Lab at Lexington Senior High School, where students are encouraged to explore emerging technologies and to build ideas that have real-world applications. His project investigated how immersive digital environments could offer new avenues for students to learn, collaborate and explore. Now the concept is in a position to reach a much larger audience, rather than being confined to a school-based experiment. French will put together a unit called Creating Digital Spaces in VR, which will take his original idea and create a structured learning event for Spark Scholars across North Carolina. The project also highlights the opportunities for students to play with technologies that are still revolutionizing education and industry. An idea born in a Spark Lab in a high school is now being scaled for students across an entire state. It shows how innovation driven by students can help expand educational opportunities for Lexington Senior High School. For French, the next few months will be spent developing an idea into an operational learning unit. His project started with the idea of a classroom in virtual reality. Now that classroom could be a shared educational experience for students well beyond his own school.

French created a first version of a virtual-reality Spark Lab last year.