Shoshana Klein
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Ontario Tech University
Abstract
The Metaverse is a virtual world where people can come together to build, learn, and create. It is important to try to understand what the Metaverse is as more young students are spending time in the Metaverse. Large companies are investing billions into building the metaverse and the technology will continue to improve. Using the Metaverse for education allows for collaboration and experience-based learning, which would be unrealistic without the Metaverse. Teachers can develop, create, or use pre-set lesson plans already created by other educators within their curriculum to enhance the learning experience of their students.
Keywords
Constructivism, Learner-Centered, Metaverse, Virtual Reality, Minecraft, Roblox, Situated Learning
Introduction
Defining the Metaverse
“So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse” (Stephenson, 1992).
The first mention of the metaverse was in the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In the novel, the Metaverse is defined as a computer-generated universe that a person is plugged into through goggles and earphones. Since then, many have defined the metaverse in different ways. The word “Meta” means virtual and transcendent, and “Verse” refers to a world or universe (Kim & Park, 2022). The Metaverse has been the focus of many recent innovations as large companies like Meta (Facebook) are investing billions into the metaverse and believe it will be the social networking platform of choice in 5-10 years (Balu & Culliford, 2021).
The metaverse has been seen in older programs like Second Life (Linden Research, 2022) and more recently in Minecraft (Microsoft, n.d.) and Roblox (Roblox, 2022), where players can go online to play and work together to achieve goals. These programs have been extremely popular, with Roblox drawing around 199 million monthly users, 54% of them under age 13 (Suh & Ahn, 2022). The younger generation has adopted these platforms but for many educators, the metaverse is an enigma, even though it seems like this technology is going to be very prevalent in our lives soon. Educators are slowly starting to use the metaverse to teach, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for the metaverse was made more prevalent. In response to this growing need, Roblox and Minecraft are making a significant investment in building the educational components of their platforms (Roblox, 2006; Microsoft, 2009).
There are disagreements about how to define the metaverse, as some believe that the experience must be truly immersive to be a metaverse. The definition of the metaverse changes depending on who you ask and can feel overwhelming at times (Hwang & Chien, 2022). For the purposes of this chapter, the Metaverse is defined as an immersive digi