VR program immerses kids in career exploration, development
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About two years ago, Gregory Peters was mulling over how to bring hands-on learning into the Allen County Juvenile Center (ACJC). They threw around ideas like building birdhouses, but they couldn’t allow certain tools and materials that are potential weapons to enter the facility.
After investing in a VR program, Peters sees the lightbulb click on for kids every day using headsets for immersive career exploration and training. Across town, hundreds of kids at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne each semester also build their skills with the tech as well.
“When they’re getting walked into our room where we have the VR setup, you just see the smiles on their face,” said Peters, ACJC director of detention and operations, “and then the excitement in their voice when they complete a new task or learn a new skill. You can hear the kids just yell out ‘I did it!'”
The Allen County Juvenile Center and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne struck a partnership with Transfr, a tech company focused on workforce development, to provide children and teens with opportunities to try out different careers without getting their hands dirty.
The program has 330 immersive simulations for a range of trades and skills from assisting with surgery to helping hotel guests to changing the oil in a car. Kids can perfect their form and earn a gold, silver or bronze star for their attempt.
As one of the few youth detention centers in the country with this type of workforce development VR program, Peters said they are ahead of the curve and proud to bring that type of opportunity to the kids they work with. That initiative is part of why Transfr’s Allen County project lead, Kate Kimmer, wanted to work with them.
“It’s really exciting because it feels like all of the things that have found have felt so insurmountable before — the challenges and barriers to folks being successful,” Kimmer said. “Those start to dissipate as we work together as a community.”
While the ACJC is Transfr’s first re-entry program in Indiana, the company has been in conversations with other juvenile detention centers in the state and has plans to expand nationally. Transfr is involved in justice systems across over 20 states.
Peters talks about how the county’s judge has a big role in pushing for these types of opportunities and how the kids get excited to use the tech.
Behind the headset
Transfr has focused on workforce development and developed software programs to provide both career exploration opportunities and pre-apprentice trades training. The company’s ultimate goal, founder and CEO Bharani Rajakumar said, is to provide paths to upward mobility and to raise wages.
“We’re not giving folks skills to do jobs, that will end up keeping them in poverty, right? We want folks to have upward mobility. We want them to have opportunity,” Kimmer said. “Connecting folks who are justice-impacted and feel like there’s nowhere for them — and there’s actually so many places for them.”
Kimmer talks about how the technology breaks down barriers and how the Allen County program is going.
Though they are a tech company, Rajakumar said they ultimately seek to design their product around supporting people. By working with organizations like the ACJC and the Boys & Girls Club, he said they are equipping those providers with a solution to improve the lives of those they work with.
The goals for all parties involved in the Allen County programs are to show kids what certain careers actually look like day-to-day, after which they’ll decide whether or not they’re interested. The most popular trainings at the ACJC and Boys & Girls Clubs are hospitality, culinary arts, construction, first responders and auto mechanics.
“The value of this immersive medium is that people can put on the headset, and many times for the first time, they can see themselves doing something that they never saw themselves doing,” Rajakumar said. “And now that they know what’s possible. That’s motivating.”
Many of the scenarios also don’t require attending a four-year degree program and can quickly move a person into a considerable salary, Rajakumar said. It gets people into the workforce where they can also take advantage of company benefits, like a 401K and healthcare as well as stability and financial freedom. Completion of one of their transfer programs can give underprivileged people and their employers confidence in their skills, he said.
The ACJC runs several programs with kids ranging from 12 to 18 years old. Their programming mixes the VR simulations with soft skills prep, like resume building and mock interviews. Every kid has the opportunity to use the VR program if they are on good behavior, Peters said, so they use the program as an incentive.
The Boys & Girls Clubs had already established a career exploration and development ecosystem with the Jim Kelley Career Pathway Center complete with several specialty labs, business partnerships, soft skills activities and visits from professionals.
The 21 VR headsets add another layer, said Nicholas Gray, vice-president of strategic partnerships & workforce development at the Boys and Girls Clubs. They intertwine the simulations into their broader programming, so kids can connect the dots between VR and reality.
“It’s pretty cool to see a kid, smile on their face, and how proud they are when they change your oil,” he said. “It’s virtually but that’s okay. That’s the first step to getting them excited about a career and learning different things.”
Gray talks about creating a pipeline of skilled workers and building up their community through working with kids.
The program also expands past the physical possibilities of the clubs, Gray said. They don’t have a garage where kids can learn to change the oil in a car, he said, and if they did, they’d have trouble meeting the number of kids wanting to try it out. Instead, hundreds of kids at the clubs last year did it virtually — and could try multiple times to perfect it.
“We actually had some technicians come in, and they were blown away at how accurate it was and how well in-depth that the program was,” Gray said. “So that’s where it’s great that students can do that.”
Virtual to reality
The technology itself is a motivator. VR headsets grace Christmas lists and sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars. Through programs like Transfr’s, kids can use the immersive technology they’re so excited about while finding inspiration and building tangible skills that can lead to a career.
The headsets also trigger a different style of learning than lectures and videos, Gray said. After sitting all day at school, he said they come excited to try out new simulations and perfect them. The next step at his clubs is augmented reality where kids can wear headsets to assist them with real tasks.
Seven teenagers who had worked through the program while in detention at the ACJC were released on probation, Kimmer said, and they decided to opt into a two-week summer program at the Boys & Girls Clubs. They were never late and showed up to every session, she said. When they graduated from the program, she said the judge showed up to tell them how proud she and everyone was of them.
“These seven kids have sat in front of that judge before and what they sat in front of that judge for was getting adjudicated for getting in trouble,” Kimmer said. “To see all those kids’ heads lift in pride of ‘I did this. I showed up for myself, and look at all these adults that are investing in me.'”
A big piece of Transfr’s mission is to break recidivism chains and systemic cycles people fall into. Offering a career pathway, Kimmer said, could have ripple effects on their families, future children and communities.
While they are still working on impact data, Peters said he knows released kids who went to the Boys & Girls Clubs or other job training programs to continue training because their interest was sparked. ACJC has a yearly contract with Transfr that Peters hopes to keep renewing as they see good results.
Last fall, about 2,000 kids and teens came through the Boys & Girls Clubs and worked on the headsets, including seventh and eighth graders at Fort Wayne Community Schools twice a week.