A mid-September Thursday was no normal day at Foothills Academy, as grade 9 students became the first classroom to ever tour the International Space Station (ISS).
Calgary-founded VRCORE Education, a company that brings virtual reality (VR) field trips to classrooms, has launched ISS: Curiosity in Orbit, a new program created with the International Space Station National Laboratory (ISSNL). Foothills Academy is the first school worldwide to partake in the experience.
The ISS: Curiosity in Orbit is one of three experiences VRCORE offers that turn open areas, like a school gym, into an immersive VR world.
Wearing HTC Focus headsets, students are taking to the moon, the ISS and partaking in an interactive quiz and classroom favourite, asteroid dodgeball.
Jillian Senek, a science teacher at Foothills Academy, booked the space experience with VRCORE to complement the school’s space focus this school year.
“Space is part of the Alberta curriculum; it’s a pretty short unit, but we decided to really embrace it this year and we’re going to have themes of space throughout all of the units this year,” she said.
“We’re going to be doing kind of a cumulative project towards the end of the unit and I’m really hoping they’ll (students) keep in mind their experiences here and be able to apply it to their project after having that more real-life experience.”
Senek, who participated in the VR experience, said she was having the “most fun ever,” and would recommend the experience to other teachers and schools.
“I’m so glad I got to participate in it, it was unbelievable,” she said.
“I’ve never done VR before, really, so I was running into kids and stepping up when there was nothing to step up on, It was amazing.”
Jason Van Hierden, owner and CEO of the Calgary branch of VRCORE, said the company started as a way to fill open slots during arcade downtime.
“This came out of a virtual reality arcade centre based here in Calgary, and we were just trying to solve the difficulty of filling hours in an arcade, so we started doing education in the arcades, which then spilled over into traveling to the schools,” he said.
“It was about three years ago that we started development of our first experiences and then about a year ago, we got a partnership with the International Space Station National Lab, and by extension, NASA and they partnered with us to pay for the experience that we’ve built.”
As the founding location, Calgary’s VRCORE has more inventing to do than other branches, said Van Hierden.
“We try a lot more things. I spend most of my time working on marketing, logistics, putting systems together for our franchisees so they can take what they’ve learned, we’ve learned works, and then duplicate it in those other cities around the world,” he said.
VRCORE’s model of building a free-roam VR arena in an hour is unique, as Van Hierden said that it takes other companies between two weeks and a month to get hardware configured properly.
Other Calgary schools, including Louis Riel, Wilma Hansen, and Mountain View Academy, have also booked VRCORE experiences for the 2025-26 school year.
