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As today's guest, Grove Learning CEO Sean Strong, says: just because something's cutting-edge, doesn't mean it has to be a pain to use. That's the philosophy behind his company, which aims to make introducing VR into a classroom easy and efficient. 

Julie: Hello, my name is Julie Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. Today on our podcast is Sean Strong. Sean is the CEO and co-founder of Grove Learning. Grove Learning is working to make VR more accessible and effective for educators worldwide. Sean studied artificial intelligence at Stanford University, worked at Apple and EdTech, and has taught over 100 students how to code. Welcome, Sean. How are you?

Sean: Hi, Julie. Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing well.

Julie: Great. Why don't you highlight a little bit about yourself and Grove Learning, and the mission that Grove Learning is bringing to education and learning?

Sean: Yep. As you mentioned, we are Grove Learning. We're a management platform for Oculus Quest and Go, specifically engineered for the classroom. We originally built VR experiences. We created a math game called Space Gerbil and we kind of realized in that process that actually bringing that to schools was very challenging, and that for your average teacher -- who might not be savvy with technology -- VR can actually be very hard to use. And so for us, we kind of started Grove Learning with this mission to really make VR simple for educators.

Julie: That's awesome. I know that you started off -- as you mentioned -- creating the content for a library to be used, I guess. And then you kind of had to take that step back -- as you said -- to ensure that the teachers had a system that they could use, that was easy to deploy in the classroom setting. And maybe you can talk a little bit about the features of your platform, and why it's so easy for teachers to pick up and use for themselves.

Sean: Yeah. The core features that we provided Grove Learning are just the things that teachers kind of wish they had without Grove Learning. And so what does that look like? That looks like you can start any experience remotely kind of from a dashboard, right? So if I have 20 students in my class, I can send them all to Julie's app, and they'll all start at the same time, synchronized. That being said, sometimes students really enjoy VR and they get a bit carried away, and it can be hard to get your students attention back. So sometimes you just want to pause, right? And with Grove Learning, you can just pause all the experiences and kind of regain control of your classroom. We allow you to group different students and so you can have five different students doing experience A and five other students doing Experience B. We kind of give you that granular control. So on one hand, we kind of allow the teacher to be in charge of the experiences on the headset. On the other hand, we tell them what exactly is going on, right? And so we can tell them what application a student is currently in. We can actually provide full video streams of all the headsets in a classroom. And so you-- can we call it card view. You can think of it as a kind of CCTV view, where you can see all the different devices and what students are actually looking at in real time, which can help teachers kind of know what's going on. Because otherwise the status quo is, teachers generally just kind of lean down and listen to headsets. And for us, we just found that listening wasn't an effective enough management tool to really make VR practical in classrooms.

Julie: So when-- if I'm a teacher and obviously I need to have a little bit of curation and knowledge based on what experiences to use in my classroom, there obviously needs to be a little bit of