Part of a well-rounded education is learning to understand other points of view. By developing empathy skills, students can make better-informed decisions in school and beyond.

In Boys Using Innovation to Learn and Design, a hands-on, project-based StC learning program, David Shin’s eighth-grade students use virtual reality technology to literally see the world through other people’s eyes. With the help of Oculus VR headsets, boys put themselves in the place of an icefield explorer or child refugee.

We’re using virtual reality to take the perspective of other people to see the world through their eyes,” said Shin. The goal of the course is to develop ways of seeing how others feel on a personal level and then to explore how empathy can be useful in other areas of education and life. “We’re going to start with interpersonal and see if we can leverage that towards business ideas that the students come up with.”

“I like that the course is technology-based,” said Wright Hilbert ‘24. “It gets us out of our inside bubble. The VR goggles help us go to a place like a refugee camp, and they show us the life of a refugee, rather than a middle school boy at a private school.”

Shin began working on the different uses of empathy as part of his dissertation, and he plans on creating a professional training resource for teachers to empathize with their students. “The hope is for them to understand what students are thinking and feeling in the classroom, which will lead to better student learning.”