Doling out a total of $298,612 this spring, ITEF awards these competitive grants to help schools in the region implement innovative educational technology and creative solutions for K-12 students.
The six recipients were The Fulton School, KIPP St. Louis Public Schools, Nerinx Hall High School, Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School, The Biome School, and the Fort Zumwalt School District.
The Fulton School received $20,988 for their project, “Creating Parallel Timelines: Virtual and Real Life (IRL) Learning Environments.” Their plans support a student-created installation that integrates virtual reality and physical timelines with robotics and AI technology to enhance individual and class lessons. The students will design a website with a virtual reality timeline, build robots, and create 3D-printed models to transform the school’s middle/high school hallway into an interactive learning space.
The objective is to develop the technical infrastructure (hardware and software) to enable students to create parallel, virtual reality (VR) and real-life (IRL) timelines for individual and class projects. This project will result in a website that makes it easy for students to create VR timelines based on real-life spaces. They will also outfit a hallway for real timelines that students can use in parallel to their virtual spaces. The real spaces will be augmented with assistive robotic technology. Both spaces will have access to a local AI conditioned with time and locale-specific documents that can converse with a user.
In the VR space, students will be able to interact with the timeline using VR headsets or a web browser, by touching objects, for example, that would give information, play media, link to other websites, or transport them to other VR spaces.
The IRL timeline could be a basic map on paper, but the students intend to use magnetic whiteboards with QR codes (automatically generated by the website) that map to different viewpoints in the VR space. They will program robotics-based guides to lead to different parts of the timeline, allowing for the addition of 3D-printed and other Makerspace-manufactured items.
The software, robotics, and AI will be built in the Makerspace Lab at The Fulton School by the student team, with the oversight of Dr. Lensyl Urbano, an Upper School Math and Science teacher and Director of the school’s Makerspace Lab.
“I really think that pairing virtual environments with real, physical ones amplifies the advantages of both,” explained Dr. Urbano, “and helps negate the disadvantages. I'm also really excited to see what our students come up with as they collaborate with their teachers to create local AI systems that actually aid learning instead of getting in the way.”
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Photo at top: Dr. Lensyl Urbano and the Upper School student team at The Fulton School who worked on the award-winning 2026 ITEF grant proposal, “Creating Parallel Timelines: Virtual and Real Life (IRL) Learning Environments.”
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The Innovative Technology Education Fund (ITEF) is a St. Louis-based, charitable, nonprofit, private 501 (c)(3) foundation that supports innovation in education by funding advanced technology in the classrooms of public, private, parochial, and charter schools in the greater St. Louis area. In addition, ITEF provides opportunities for educators to continue to grow and learn in their field. Their work is supported through the FCC license they hold for four Educational Broadband channels in St. Louis, Missouri. For more information about ITEF, visit www.innovteched.com