Career XRcade · Verizon Innovative Learning
Career XRcade
Cybersecurity Land
“The barrier to educational XR was never vision. It was the cost of execution, and who gets to do the building.”
Professional VR requires Unity development, 3D pipelines, instructional design, and subject matter expertise, rarely in one team. Cybersecurity Land was a test: can a student-driven framework produce all five career simulations at once?And harder: how do you make a SOC Analyst's role feel real inside a headset when the job has no physical analog?
- Framework DesignDesigned the 5-phase CXR process, toolkits, and collaboration model for 20+ contributors.
- Experience ArchitectureDefined the hub-and-exhibit structure, 5 career paths, and interaction models for each exhibit.
- ResearchBuilt survey instruments and conducted interviews applying Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM).
- Team LeadershipDirected 15–20 student developers, 3 instructional designers, 3 high school teachers, and 2 industry professionals.
- Toolkit AuthorshipBuilt the reusable Unity prototyping toolkit — NPCs, mini-games, educational UIs, rewards, navigation — used across both Career Lands.
Strategic planning, stakeholder alignment, and industry partnership. Teams formed and scope locked.
Expert interviews, 26 persona documents, 40 user stories. Verizon partnership secured. Authentic career representation established.
Student-led ideation workshops with instructional designers mapped cybersecurity curriculum to gamifiable mechanics in Miro.
Ideation → wireframes → graybox → Unity prototype → build. CXR toolkit made every step accessible to all skill levels.
In-person VR demos, usability surveys, and monthly stakeholder reviews drove continuous refinement.
Five exhibits. Each translates an abstract cybersecurity role into a first-person game mechanic. Guided by Holobuddy — a context-aware NPC that hints without interrupting.
Threat identification, password security, and spoofing simulations.
Monitoring dashboards, triage workflows, incident response decision trees.
Firewall configuration, network monitoring, Honeypot placement.
Penetration testing scenarios, vulnerability identification, ethical hacking.
App security design, authentication flows, cryptography puzzles.
Weekly sessions gave student developers creative ownership over each exhibit. Authenticity came from inside the system — not imposed from outside it.
One toolkit — NPCs, mini-games, rewards, navigation — meant five exhibits weren't five productions. That's what made scaling possible.
A honeypot has no physical form. A SOC analyst triages — so the game mechanic is triage. The role becomes legible through the decision pattern, not the jargon.
High school students, university developers, instructional designers, and industry professionals in the same process. That range wasn't overhead — it was the material.
Likert-scale surveys (N=13 student developers) and semi-structured interviews — measuring developer identity, self-efficacy, collaboration, and toolkit effectiveness.
“CXR has opened my eyes and doors in my brain for thinking about different career paths and made me think about my future career in sound design.”
“Collaboration has been the driving force behind its success — the collective intelligence of the team led to a well-rounded project.”
“Career XRcade was created in a way that kept students in mind — where they are developmentally, and how they could use that to picture a career they never saw for themselves.”
- —Deployed globally through Verizon Innovative Learning — US high schools
- —Partnered with Verizon, ASU J.Orin Edson Institute, and Meteor Studio
- —CXR Framework validated across Cybersecurity Land and Esports Land
- —Open-release CXR templates in development for broader institutional adoption