Virtual reality technology has existed since the late 1950s; however, its use in the educational sector has been limited because of the cost of the equipment, inaccessibility of the technology, issues of usability, and lack of appropriate educational content and educator training. New technological advances have resolved some of these limitations. Additionally, affordable virtual reality equipment that has been predominately used with adults shows compelling results, highlighting the potential of this technology when used with children for educational purposes. This article presents an overview of immersive virtual reality’s potential as a learning tool with children, highlighting its current uses, research with children for educational purposes, and the existing barriers for the applicability and implementation of immersive virtual reality in school settings.

Piaget’s theory of stage structure is synonymous with discussions involving cognitive development. As with any theoretical model, researchers inevitably and rightly seek to affirm and/or contest the elements of the model presented. In this comparative study, students’ performance across three hands-on engineering tasks for two distinct student cohort groups were investigated including young primary school students (aged 8 to 10) in Piaget’s concrete operations; and older secondary school students (aged 15 to 18) in Piaget’s formal operations stage of cognitive development. The purpose was to gain an insight into Piaget’s stage structure from the perspective of the compulsory national Technologies curriculum in Australia, of which engineering is a core subject. The senior students outperformed their younger peers on all three tasks (simple, complicated and complex), with differences in abstraction and spatial inferential reasoning abilities increasing, as the task complexity increased. Although there is very limited evidence linking practical technological subjects and Piaget’s cognitive development model, the findings were consistent with respect to students’ abstract thinking capabilities and their cognitive development.

Humanoid robots are being used in some schools, however, research on the use of these robots is relatively new. In this three-year study, humanoid robots were deployed in 10 schools, involving 29 teachers across early childhood to Year 10. This study aimed to ascertain teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges, the pedagogical practices that helped with student engagement, and where the robots fitted in the curriculum. Through multiple case studies, teachers’ views were explored and results from the study supports the deployment of humanoid robots. The study advocates a constructivist inquiry approach to using humanoid robots across the curriculum.