STEM collaboration in virtual world academy

There is general agreement about the importance of increasing the number of students choosing career fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). However most of the initiatives designed to get students interested in STEM fields are constrained by floor space, budget, or driving distance. These factors, in combination, act to limit the affordability and accessibility of research opportunities in STEM fields to students in schools faced with increasingly limited budgets or lacking access to experienced STEM teachers. Since a trained STEM workforce is crucial to tackling research challenges of importance to the Air Force and the nation, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Discovery Lab program has developed a Virtual Reality Academy (VRA) program utilizing open source virtual reality software, Open Simulator, to create a virtual collaboration environment called Virtual (reality) Discovery Center (VDC). This 16-region VDC is the key to the Discovery Lab's 1,000 Student Outreach initiative designed to greatly expand the Discovery Lab's ability to make project-based “hands-on” research experience accessible to students across the country via the Open Simulator collaboration technologies. This paper highlights many of the successful efforts to establish VDC Virtual Learning Academies in areas such as Biology, Nanotechnology, Computer Vision, and Mobile Computing (smartphone apps). This paper is not a scientific study of Open Simulator as a collaboration tool for STEM but rather a descriptive overview of its successful implementation locally and nationally - suggesting its potential as a game-changer in STEM education and research.