From taking a trip to Mars to holding a human brain in her hands, it’s fair to say that 16-year-old Kaleigh Carmine has had some remarkable experiences at school, all thanks to virtual reality (VR). “In science we can do experiments that would be too dangerous in real life,” she says. “I loved the biology lesson when we got to step inside a cell. It really helped me to understand the structure.”
Carmine is American but has lived in South Korea, the Netherlands and Qatar over the past four years. Her parents are both university professors who frequently move for work. Recently, they returned to California but Carmine was apprehensive about going to a US school and wanted to continue studying for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) she started in the Netherlands. Attending the online school King’s InterHigh, which offers the first fully integrated online IBDP, seemed like “an amazing opportunity”, she says. “It’s much better than anything I’d experienced when learning online during Covid. I think that has a lot to do with the technology and tools the school uses. It’s that extra step, which makes it feel like actual school.”
