Edgar J. Rojas-Muñoz Aims to Boost Virtual Reality Education For High School Students
The program 'VirtuHS' is in partnership with Frisco ISD's Career and Technical Education Center.
Edgar J. Rojas-Muñoz, Ph.D., assistant professor in Visualization, is developing a self-sustaining virtual reality education framework to implement in high schools.
The program, titled VirtuHS, places high school students in developer and leadership roles to create VR projects that assist classroom needs, with guidance from Rojas-Muñoz and Texas A&M University students.
Rojas-Muñoz teaches in the Visual Computing and Computational Media section in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. His research focuses on how mixed-reality technologies can assist people in their day-to-day lives.
“I see a need for VR technologies to be applied into high school education,” he said. “The goal is to understand what it takes to create a pipeline in which VR can be incorporated into high schools in a self-sustainable way. Meaning that students should be able to advocate for themselves and target VR projects needed for their particular high school.”
In 2024, Rojas-Muñoz reached out to the Texas A&M Spark! PK-12 Engineering Education Outreach Program to collaborate. He connected with Forrest Medcalf, an engineering teacher at Frisco ISD’s Career and Technical Education Center, who welcomed the opportunity to introduce students to VR.
Throughout the 2025-2026 school year, Rojas-Muñoz and his students met virtually with Medcalf’s engineering students. The high school juniors worked as developers to identify classroom needs and create VR-based solutions.
As those students became seniors, they stepped into leadership roles to mentor the next cohort. Now in its second cycle, VirtuHS includes 35 engineering and computer science students from 12 Frisco ISD high schools.
“Students have different roles and are tasked with creating a product that meets a customer’s needs and vision,” Medcalf said. “This experience provides them with an understanding of customer needs, software design, managing time on a long-term project, working as a team and reaching a big goal.”
In March, the students visited Texas A&M to present their projects. Liam West, a senior at Rick Reedy High School, helped create “Traffic Stop,” a simulation that places users in the role of a police officer conducting a traffic stop. The project challenges users to make decisions based on the driver’s temperament. West said his favorite part was learning how different elements of VR shape the user experience.
“Dr. Rojas-Muñoz really emphasizes the ability to create a universal design for everyone, and that’s something I really enjoyed learning,” West said. “I was originally going to study aerospace engineering in college, but when I started working on this it shifted things for me, and now I’m looking more into computer engineering.”
Hasini Suresh, a junior at Heritage High School, and her group presented “Cosmo Quest,” which aims to help students visualize the orbiting process around Earth. Suresh said the mentorship she received helped prepare her to take on a leadership role next year.
“We tried really hard to deliver a great product because we wanted to present something good,” she said. “It was really nice to see that Dr. Rojas-Muñoz knew we were motivated, and he gave us good feedback in a direct way that helped us work on our projects properly.”
Robert Dahl, an aerospace engineering teacher at the Career and Technical Education Center who worked with one of the student teams, said he enjoyed watching the students grow into confident, capable designers.
“To see them present their work with such authority and to personally experience the quality of their solution was a testament to their hard work and the incredible opportunity they were given,” Dahl said.
Rojas-Muñoz submitted two projects for the Faculty Submitted Student Work Exhibition and both were showcased in the 2026 SIGGRAPH conference in California. Earlier this year, he was awarded a Montague-CTE Scholars Award, which comes with a $6,500 grant he plans to use to help facilitate the program across multiple school districts.
He said his favorite aspect of VirtuHS is seeing students discover their potential while developing critical problem-solving skills.
“I want these students to see that VR is more than what you see in movies or in labs — it’s something that can be used in your day-to-day,” Rojas-Muñoz said. “I also want to help them create projects they can use in their high schools, and to see they made something that can make a difference and help people learn better.”
