Kai XR, an EdTech platform started by a Northern Virginia history teacher, is taking students around the world and beyond without ever leaving the classroom.
Kai Frazier, founder and CEO who recently moved to Birmingham, taught students who were mainly from underserved communities in Title 1 schools. Despite having some of the best museums in the country in their backyard of Washington, D.C., the school had limited resources and could not fund educational field trips or technology investments. Frazier watched as students graduated high school and struggled in the workforce due to the lack of technology exposure and general educational immersion experiences.
Frazier began working at the museums her students were unable to visit, including the The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in an effort to bring learning back to the classroom and bridge the educational gap. While working at museums she thought of a solution: if students cannot go to the museums, why not bring the museums to them through VR (Virtual Reality)?
In recent years, VR has been introduced to museums across the globe as a means to educate visitors through immersive exhibit experiences. Frazier realized this technology could help prepare students for a highly technical future and in 2018, she brought VR headsets to her classroom.
“I rented a VR 360 camera. I filmed my first prototype at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. I brought it back to my students and saw how big of a deal it was for them. One, because they were excited to use a technology they had never seen and two, they were seeing things they had never seen before, despite it being in their backyard,” said Frazier.
Seeing how excited and receptive her students were to the technology, Frazier decided to start a VR learning platform fit for the classroom environment. She sold her house, car and most of her belongings and moved to Silicon Valley to invest her life in what would become Kai XR.
Since then, the Kai XR has evolved to offer an annual subscription that includes over 100 virtual field trips where students can explore a variety of topics, from the Obama portraits to aerospace engineering. Teachers can also utilize the KAI XR’s drag and drop 3D makerspace and the Learn platform, which allows teachers to create a full curriculum or plug into the ready-made Metaverse courses.
Kai XR was created to be accessible on both 5G mobile devices and smartphones, so students are able to use the technology at home. At-home engagement has been seen to improve the digital literacy of not only students, but the parents who have been championing the technology at home.
Tech For Teachers
As a teacher herself, Frazier explained that Kai XR was created to make teachers’ lives easier, not remove them from the classroom.
“We don’t want to replace teachers. Being a teacher, I know firsthand what it feels like to have all of the pressure on you. And if you’re a teacher, you spend your Sunday night stressing out about what you’re going to teach on Monday and so we try to have those pre-made lessons for our teachers to give back their Sunday nights,” Frazier said.
To ease the transition of introducing new technology to the classroom, Kai XR offers co-teaching sessions for teachers’ professional development. Frazier says that this hands-on support offer is key to scaling and implementation.
Most recently, Kai XR has expanded to Birmingham, Alabama for an in-school pilot. Experimenting with the technology in the classroom has yielded great learnings for the company, allowing them to continue building out the product and its content to the preferences of customers (students, teachers and parents).
Kai XR is looking to continue giving students from all backgrounds the opportunity to see the world using VR in the classroom.
“We’re always looking for new schools, new school districts and libraries [to partner with]. We even work with juvenile detention centers. So anybody that is looking for ways to really make learning engaging, while giving students a head start for the future by using these technologies.”