We are failing 50% of students

50% of incoming college freshmen choosing to enter STEM fields will leave the STEM curriculum track. The majority of these students that leave are women, African American, and Hispanic and Latino minorities (13, 14). One of the research-driven pedagogical cognitive abilities that is a prerequisite to success in STEM is spatial reasoning (1,2,3). Spatial reasoning can be developed through physical hands-on activities but present challenges to teachers who themselves are likely to have underdeveloped spatial reasoning skills and/or these physical activities can be messy and disruptive for day to day use in the classroom. By curating AR/VR resources (digital == no mess) with prebuilt content we hope to increase adoption and usage to improve spatial reasoning skills in students and therefore STEM outcomes in their first year of college. We will seek to measure some of these interventions with our university and public school partnerships.