Pierce XRLab: Designing and Developing an Innovative Two-Year XR Curriculum for Immersive Learning in Middle School

Abstract

This article presents the design of Pierce XRLab, a two-year standalone curriculum developed for middle school students (Grades 8–9) at Pierce – The American College of Greece. The program is framed as an educational curriculum that approaches XR both as an academic subject and as a medium for fostering interpretation, critical media literacy, creative production, and responsible participation. Across the two grades, students revisit key concepts with Grade 8 establishing an experiential and interpretive foundation and Grade 9 extending this work toward critique, identity, ethics, and design-oriented production. The curriculum follows a spiral structure in which learners return to core ideas as they move from first-person experience to interpretation and, subsequently, to design-oriented practice. To support feasibility in school settings, the curriculum emphasizes equity, safety, and usability through minimal, cost-effective setups and standardized routines that integrate digital XR experiences with physical-world activities. Its pedagogical framework draws on constructivist and constructionist perspectives, embodied cognition, and experiential pragmatist learning, positioning XR as a cultural medium for meaning-making and knowledge that shapes perception, attention, representation, and social participation. Learning is organized into four principal strands: embodied engagement; representation and illusion; culture and identity; and experience design, critique, and ethics. Assessment is conceived as predominantly formative and artifact-based, making use of experience logs, critical briefs, and design projects to students’ interpretations and design choices. Finally, the curriculum is designed with transferability in mind, allowing for adaptation across public and private educational settings despite differences in infrastructure, device availability, staffing, and other contextual conditions.