When we build Koala, we picture a tutor and a child in a lesson. We rarely get to see what happens in that lesson, and almost never through the eyes of a researcher. So we were thrilled when Dr Tracey Little, a Senior Special Education Instructor in Trinidad and Tobago, told us she had written her doctoral thesis about teaching in Koala Go.

Her thesis, A Case Study Analysis: Teachers’ Experiences Using the Metaverse to Enhance the Learning and Development of Students with Intellectual Disability in Primary Schools in Trinidad, was submitted in July 2025 for the Doctor of Education in Teaching and Learning with Emerging Technologies at The University of the West Indies Global Campus. It is 216 pages long. Here is what it found, shared with her permission.

How it started

During the pandemic, Dr Little was delivering intervention to special needs students who could no longer come to her for hands-on, multisensory work. She went looking for a virtual alternative. In her words, “Research via Facebook led her to the Koala Classroom which has since been developed into the now, Koala Go Playground.” She went on to train two colleagues on it, and she describes the experience as rewarding “particularly because of the students’ responses to how the Koala classroom was designed.”

The study

In September and October 2024, four teachers from three government primary schools each worked with one Standard 2 student with a mild or moderate intellectual disability. Two were special education teachers and two taught general education. Each teacher designed a Koala Go playground for their own student and then taught in it. Dr Little interviewed the teachers, observed their sessions, read their reflective journals, and ran two focus groups, held inside a Koala Go playground so the teachers could talk about it from within it.

The study is about the teachers’ experiences, not a measurement of student outcomes. Dr Little is clear about that, and calls the findings “context-specific” rather than statistically generalizable. What follows is what the teachers saw and what changed in how they taught.

What the teachers built

Each playground was designed around one child. One teacher built a maze, turning a 2D maze into a 3D one. Others built a functional literacy programme, phonemic awareness activities, and a virtual museum with Trinidad and Tobago’s national emblems: the Coat of Arms, the Scarlet Ibis and the Cocrico. The playgrounds were filled with the sounds of home: tassa drums, steelpan, calypso, and a game of hopscotch. One teacher adjusted the sound to suit her student’s sensory needs. Another recorded her own spoken directions so her student could follow along.

Three of the teachers deliberately designed their playgrounds so that their student could not fail. Students found their own ways to complete the tasks.

Nessa

The moment that stayed with us most comes from a teacher the thesis calls Ava Tar, and her student, Nessa.

Ava Tar had been close to tears more than once during the study when describing what Nessa could not yet do in daily life. Then she watched Nessa build her own avatar, with her own skin colour, and dress it step by step. “These are not things Nessa could do in real life,” she said.

Inside Ava Tar’s museum playground, Nessa clapped and listened to the music. When the recorded national anthem played, she stood at attention. When she heard the steelpan, she leaned forward and moved her hands as if she were holding the pan sticks. She talked with her teacher, and with Dr Little, a stranger. And partway through, she asked, “Where’s my lipstick?” She remembered choosing lipstick for her avatar, and noticed she couldn’t see the colour while she was moving around.

Dr Little writes that Ava Tar made more breakthroughs with Nessa in that 45-minute session than she ever had in the general education classroom. Afterwards, Ava Tar asked the question we keep coming back to:

“I wondered if it really is that these students have memory deficits or if we are simply not providing them with the right stimuli, to stimulate or engage that memory.”

“He wasn’t ready to go back to class”

Another teacher, Cam Era, worked with a boy who was apprehensive at the start. As the session went on, he created his avatar and began exploring the playground without waiting for her instructions. When she told him the session was over, his face fell. “Did you see his face when I told him we were finished,” she said. “He wasn’t ready to go back to class.” Nessa wasn’t ready to leave either.

Dr Little draws a practical lesson from this: if a student is this engaged in a virtual space, teachers need to plan the transition back to the physical classroom, so the progress carries over.

A safe place to make mistakes

Several teachers talked about safety. Ava Tar described the playground as “a safe space free from the possibility of being bullied because our children have not been taught how to celebrate diversity.” For a shy child, she said, being an avatar among other avatars offered some shelter, and a gradual way into socialising. Each teacher’s playground also sat behind its own private link, which kept outsiders out.

One teacher, Navi Gatḗ, worked with a student so shy that, when asked about her avatar, she said quietly, “I am nobody.” He coached her through creating one, and let her take control of her own space.

What was hard

The thesis is honest about the difficulties, and so are we. The teachers found the first steps hard: getting into the platform, following the avatar instructions, finding their way around the block menu, and using a mouse. They said our YouTube training videos were useful because they could rewatch them, but also “advanced and fast paced”, so they leaned on colleagues and family for help. Designing a playground took time, and time was the challenge they mentioned most. They told Dr Little that the free plan, which they used, gave them limited access to the full platform, and they wanted more culturally relevant materials to build with. Internet connectivity and access to devices were barriers too.

Not every session was a breakthrough. One student was put off by the challenge and still needed his teacher’s guidance throughout. Another student’s frequent absences stalled the playground her teacher was designing with her. And one teacher doubted the approach would work in a full general education classroom without a classroom aide.

We are taking this feedback seriously, especially about how teachers get started.

“The children are ready”

Dr Little concludes that by teaching in Koala Go, the teachers “enhanced the learning and development of students with ID through a pedagogical transformation” in how they planned, adapted and responded to their students. The most striking change she found was in the teachers themselves. They moved between roles: facilitator, co-builder, learner, cheerleader. One said her stress “turned into fun and joy” as she began to understand what was needed. The thesis ends with a proposed training framework to help more Caribbean teachers do the same.

Ava Tar put it most directly:

“They keep asking the question, what’s wrong with the children? … The children are ready. We are not ready. The children are equipped.”

Thank you

Thank you, Dr Little, for the years of work behind this thesis, and to the four teachers who opened their playgrounds and their journals to it. If you teach children with learning differences and want to try building a playground of your own, you can start with Koala Go for free.

The 🐨 Team