Pierce participated in the 12th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN2026), one of the leading international conferences on extended reality and immersive learning in education. The conference took place in June 2026, featuring sessions in virtual reality environments alongside in-person presentations in Athens, hosted at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Under the theme “From Plato’s Cave to Open Immersive Societies: Transforming Learning and Knowledge”, the conference focused on immersive technologies, extended reality (XR), virtual and augmented learning environments, and the pedagogical opportunities emerging for the future of education.

Dr Yannis Mygdanis, Music Teacher at Pierce and Curriculum Designer of the Pierce XRLab program, participated with a presentation entitled “Pierce XRLab: Designing and Developing an Innovative Two-Year XR Curriculum for Immersive Learning in Middle School”. The presentation outlined the design and development of Pierce XRLab, an innovative two-year XR curriculum for students in A and B Gymnasium as well as A Lyceum, which was piloted at Pierce this year. The program approaches extended reality both as a subject and as a medium for fostering interpretation, critical media literacy, creative production, and responsible participation.

The pedagogical framework of Pierce XRLab draws on constructivist and constructionist approaches, theories of embodied cognition, and pragmatist experiential learning. XR is approached as a cultural medium for making meaning and knowledge, shaping perception, attention, representation, and the sense of presence in digital and virtual environments. Learning is organized around four key strands: embodied engagement, representation and illusion, culture and identity, as well as experience design, critique, and ethics in XR technologies.

The presentation highlighted Pierce XRLab as an innovative and transferable curricular framework that can be adapted to a variety of educational settings, regardless of differences in infrastructure, available devices, staffing, and organizational conditions.

Pierce’s participation in iLRN2026 reaffirms the school’s sustained engagement in the international dialogue on emerging technologies in education and highlights its commitment to developing innovative, responsible, and pedagogically grounded learning experiences.
Read the published paper in the conference proceedings.