Virtual Reality Takes Physics Students to Another Planet

One of the good things about working on our campus is the interdisciplinary environment. When I saw what the VR researchers were doing, I realized that their expertise could be applied to education. Their tools seemed like a natural fit for my own thoughts about teaching high school students about atoms.

I had previously done volunteer science outreach in schools, and I often struggled to keep the students engaged. Teenagers naturally have short attention spans and are surrounded by many electronic distractions. And I realized that board-based lessons tended to make traditional education feel boring. This is a problem because attracting students to science is already challenging enough. When teachers introduced the concept of atoms, for example, they simply sketched them on the blackboard. The more daring ones brought in replicas made of Styrofoam balls resembling a planetary system.

Yes. VR offers all the features that play to the interest of teenagers: technology, immersion, and screens are all familiar parts of their everyday lives. Moreover, VR allows you to do what you can’t in real life, such as virtually holding atoms in your hand. You can zoom in enough to see how many electrons, protons, and neutrons they have, and push atoms together to make molecules.

In traditional chemistry classes, students would learn these concepts through reading and memorizing. But doing this with your hands generates a level of excitement that makes the class way more entertaining. The VR experience generates a spectacular enthusiasm that teachers can build on later.

My colleagues and I got support from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, which is focused on supporting charities and social enterprises, to conduct three pilot projects in a local school: one on atoms, another on light refraction—covering light beams and the wave nature of light—and a third on vaccines. Everything was developed within the university, together with scientists specializing in each area. In 2025, we tested the VR program at a technical high school run by the National University of General San Martín itself, located in a low-income, marginalized neighborhood in Greater Buenos Aires.

First, we explain what the students will be studying, so they know what they will be focusing on: atomic models, basic molecules, and so on. Then they put on their headsets and enter a virtual world. We came up with the idea of placing the students in a colony on another planet, designed to exaggerate some laws of physics, where they must solve a problem affecting the colony.

For example, in one exercise, the students have to figure out a suitable combustion method for burning methane to heat a greenhouse; otherwise, their plants will die. In the vaccine scenario, they have to design and distribute an antigen to treat an infected dog and protect the entire colony. And in the light-as-a-wave module, they encounter a strange phenomenon: In a world where everything is frozen, the images they see appear to be inverted. They have to figure out that the effect is caused by the refraction of light in a very cold atmosphere.

They are guided by a voice that tells them what to do, so the experience is structured, but they still have some freedom to explore while progressing toward a certain goal. They don’t interact with each other, but they all go through the steps more or less at the same time.

We came away feeling that this modern technology empowered students who face difficult circumstances. The responses were positive. For instance, a boy who typically never participated in the classroom became very talkative and excited during the VR experience. We now want to expand this initiative, adding other projects in physics, mathematics, and biology for schools in Argentina and other Latin American countries. Our plan is to test our program in other schools this year and then scale it up.

We bought 12 of these VR headsets from the US. They’re actually cheaper than laptops, and a school might have, say, 25 units to rotate among the courses. Each student uses one while seated at their desk, and the program is designed to keep hand and body movements to a minimum to avoid collisions.

I don’t want to sound dramatic, but the funding cuts of recent years have been so extensive that many scientists are leaving. It’s a very tough moment. What’s been destroyed will take many decades to rebuild, so we need to work hard and keep looking to the future. As a theoretical physicist, I don’t need much to carry on, but experimentalists don’t have access to supplies. We risk losing one or two generations of scientists.