Due to poor and unreliable network connections, students in rural Michigan miss out on learning with virtual reality. Therefore, T-Mobile collaborates with Prisms VR, a learning platform pioneering in math education. Together with Lenawee Intermediary School District in Michigan, they are deploying Prisms VR’s learning programs on Meta Quest 2 VR headsets connected to T-Mobile 5G across 11 school districts.
T-Mobile is teaming up with Prisms VR to connect virtual reality (VR) headsets to its 5G network. This way, they want to enable students and teachers across the country with interactive math and science lessons. These lessons are designed to close the opportunity gap in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The first roll-out is planned for rural Michigan where they collaborate with Lenawee Intermediary School District.
Prisms VR and Michigan School District collaboration
Prisms VR is already working with the school district to enable students to build lasting proficiencies across core middle school math and science topics while solving real world problems. The school district in Michigan already reported improved lesson engagement and retention with 80% of students who participated saying they better understood the concepts and received higher grades.
However, internet is poor in these rural areas, impacted in total 19 million people in the United States. Therefore, T-Mobile stepped in to improve the connectivity. The carrier isn’t unfamiliar with Prisms because the company was part of T-Mobile’s accelerator program. Since its graduation from the program in 2021, T-Mobile helped to rapidly scale its solutions, including $425K awarded in funding for VR headsets distributed to 20 schools so far.
T-Mobile 5G connects VR
“A major roadblock our teachers have in implementing new technologies like Prisms VR is often due to unreliable network connections,” added Ann Smart, Educational Technology Consultant, Lenawee Intermediary School District. “Prisms VR came to us with the recommendation to use T-Mobile 5G paired with their learning programs, which we’ve been able to easily adopt use at over 15 schools in rural Michigan, with outstanding responses from students and teachers.”
T-Mobile and Prisms VR have worked together to deliver VR headsets and internet, but this is the first project to cover such a wide area. “Our work with Prisms VR is just another example of our goal to bring 5G innovation to everyone,” said John Saw, EVP, Advanced & Emerging Technologie at T-Mobile. “From major cities to small town America, our 5G network is inspiring and creating opportunities for students to connect with the world around them like never before.”
Teach STEM through one’s own life experience
CEO and founder of Prisms VR, Anurupa Ganguly, says: “Our mission at Prisms VR is to make math relevant and connected to the world that students want to live in. VR powered by T-Mobile 5G allows us to democratize access to visceral experiences that empower students to build connections with current and compelling problems and abstract up to math models and equations from there, rather than memorizing procedures in a sterile vacuum. With recent advances in spatial computing, we finally can teach STEM disciplines how they should be taught: through one’s own life experiences.”
