Co-Designing Learning Supports for Cultural Virtual Reality Experiences with Namibian Primary School Learners

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Virtual reality (VR) applications hold great potential to create cultural experiences, yet they often focus on cultural heritage preservation incorporating entertainment rather than learning aspects.This study, embedded within a larger project of digitalising local traditional practices in VR, explored co-designing learning supports with primary school learners.Adopting a participatory design approach, learners participated in co-design sessions to create supports for a previously developed VR experience depicting a nomadic community's hunting process.Based on their designs, two prototypes were developed: a non-player character and a poster-board guide.Both were evaluated by the learners, and further design suggestions were gathered.The study offers insights into personalised learning experiences as envisioned by learners, highlighting the need for autonomy and agency, the dissonance between learners' preferences and authentic cultural knowledge transmission practices, as well as their reliance on familiar technological features.