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 JulieSmithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. Today on ourpodcast is Sean Strong. Sean is the CEO and co-founder of GroveLearning. Grove Learning is working to make VR more accessible andeffective for educators worldwide. Sean studied artificialintelligence at Stanford University, worked at Apple and EdTech, andhas taught over 100 students how to code. Welcome, Sean. How are you?

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

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

Sean: Yep. As you mentioned, weare Grove Learning. We're a management platform for Oculus Quest andGo, specifically engineered for the classroom. We originally built VRexperiences. We created a math game called Space Gerbil and we kindof realized in that process that actually bringing that to schoolswas very challenging, and that for your average teacher -- who mightnot 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 toreally make VR simple for educators.

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

Sean: Yeah. The core featuresthat we provided Grove Learning are just the things that teacherskind of wish they had without Grove Learning. And so what does thatlook like? That looks like you can start any experience remotely kindof from a dashboard, right? So if I have 20 students in my class, Ican send them all to Julie's app, and they'll all start at the sametime, synchronized. That being said, sometimes students really enjoyVR and they get a bit carried away, and it can be hard to get yourstudents attention back. So sometimes you just want to pause, right?And with Grove Learning, you can just pause all the experiences andkind of regain control of your classroom. We allow you to groupdifferent students and so you can have five different students doingexperience A and five other students doing Experience B. We kind ofgive you that granular control. So on one hand, we kind of allow theteacher to be in charge of the experiences on the headset. On theother hand, we tell them what exactly is going on, right? And so wecan tell them what application a student is currently in. We canactually provide full video streams of all the headsets in aclassroom. And so you-- can we call it card view. You can think of itas a kind of CCTV view, where you can see all the different devicesand what students are actually looking at in real time, which canhelp teachers kind of know what's going on. Because otherwise thestatus quo is, teachers generally just kind of lean down and listento headsets. And for us, we just found that listening wasn't aneffective enough management tool to really make VR practical inclassrooms.

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