With funding from the Small Business Innovation Research program of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, Electric Funstuff—in partnership with EDC|CCT and WNET—is expanding upon its successful Mission US series with TimeSnap VR. This game-based virtual reality platform will pioneer a new approach to high school history education by immersing students in key moments in U.S. history while engaging them with standards-aligned, document-based historical investigations.

We will serve as research partner to support the development and evaluation of four TimeSnap VR missions, an accompanying series of historical inquiry “Mission Briefs,” and a teacher- and student-facing dashboard to support classroom implementation. A pilot study in Year 2 will evaluate the usability and feasibility of the TimeSnap experience in a conventional classroom setting, in addition to its impact of on students’ content knowledge and proficiency with historical thinking, the project also will explore relationships between students’ prior knowledge, self-reported experience of presence in VR, and learning outcomes.