Kenyan schools have adopted the use of Virtual reality (VR) in classrooms to enhance traditional learning and teach children about social and environmental issues. They can take virtual trip from the comfort of a classroom. 

At school in the capital city of Kenya, Nairobi, students don virtual reality headsets and go on school trips with a difference. According to organizers, it is difficult for children to understand topics like plastic pollution and climate change when taught theory alone. But with Virtual reality technology, students can see for themselves the impacts on the environment.

In Nairobi’s Mathare neighborhood, students at Mcedo Beijing School have been studying the collection and sorting of rubbish. Student Annette Jeptoo claims that “Ukwenza VR has helped me and other students to take care of the environment by separating plastics and organic waste”.

Another student, Rooney Odhiambo said before I  would consume plastic bottles and discard them in whatever way, but I no longer purchase soda or water in a plastic bottle, I buy soda in a glass bottle”.

Kenya-based Ukwenza VR primarily works with schools in low-income communities, giving kids access to virtual field trips that would otherwise be impractical owing to budgetary restrictions. The social enterprise focuses on problems including climate change and plastic litter.

The risks that plastic trash poses to the environment have been made clear to students, who have been motivated to take action.

Njeri Ndonga, co-founder and CEO of Ukwenza VR said, “When you think about an issue as complex as plastic pollution, or even climate change, the question is usually; how can we make children care enough about the issue for them to act differently? Which is very challenging.”

“Virtual reality comes in helping them, one, conceptualize the problem. It’s one thing to say ‘Don’t throw away waste,’ but it is another thing to understand that if I throw away a plastic bottle, it will end up in the Indian Ocean and it will affect marine life, which then affects me because I want to eat that fish. So, you are able to create a chain that helps them connect their action to each thing that happens along the way,” he continued.

Anne Njine, an expert in education, supports the idea. She claims that virtual reality fosters children’s empathy for the topics they are learning about.

“What VR does is that it helps the children get the right emotions in place and because VR is more effective in project-based activities, then there is a lot of collaboration and discussions that comes from there,” says Njine.