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VR Welding Training for K-12 Students

  • 2:49 runtime
  • Manufacturing
  • Updated March 2026
Overview

What You'll See in This Demo

This demo showcases how virtual reality can give young people a genuine, firsthand glimpse into what a career in the skilled trades actually looks and feels like — long before they ever have to choose one. Set inside a gamified virtual amusement park, students step into the role of a welder, completing immersive challenges and real-world repair scenarios that make a skilled trade feel exciting, achievable, and worth exploring. For organizations facing a talent pipeline challenge, this is what early-stage career awareness looks like in practice — meeting the next generation where they are, in the technology and media-rich world they already live in. Whether you’re a manufacturer, trade association, workforce development organization, or school district, this approach shows how immersive learning can turn curiosity into career interest at exactly the right age.

Key Learning Objectives

Introduce any skilled trade or technical career in a safe, zero-risk virtual environment
Reach learners before they've ruled out a career path
Deliver hands-on training without specialized equipment, labs, or certified instructors
Drive engagement through competition, rewards, and gamified progression
Build a talent pipeline by sparking early interest in your industry
Give educators a turnkey tool they can use without deep subject matter expertise
FAQ

Common Questions

Can VR be used to introduce young people to skilled trades careers?+
Yes — and it's one of the most effective ways to do it. VR allows students to step inside a career and experience what the work actually feels like, without any real-world barriers. For industries like welding, manufacturing, and construction, where hands-on context is everything, immersive simulations give young people a meaningful first impression that traditional classroom instruction simply can't replicate.
How can manufacturers and trade organizations address the skilled trades talent pipeline problem?+
The most effective pipeline strategies start early — before students have already decided college is their only path. VR-based career exploration programs meet young people in K-12 classrooms, making skilled trades feel relevant, exciting, and achievable at a formative age. Organizations that invest in early awareness create a larger, more interested pool of future candidates down the road.
What makes gamified learning effective for K-12 career exploration?+
Gamification works because it speaks the language of younger learners — competition, achievement, and play. When career exploration feels like a challenge worth completing rather than a lesson to sit through, students engage more deeply, remember more, and are more likely to pursue the subject further. It turns passive exposure into active interest.
How do we bring a VR career exploration program to our organization or school district?+
Every program Roundtable Learning builds is custom-designed around your industry, your audience, and your goals. Watch the demo to see what's possible, then connect with our team to explore what a solution could look like for your organization.
Transcript

Video Transcript

00:00 | Welcome & Weld Setup
The weld that we are going to work on today is vertical, So we can use GMAW or MIG welding. Now put on your PPE so we can get started.

00:13 | About the Voyage Arc Partnership
So we partnered with Lincoln Electric to develop a virtual reality training that’s aimed more towards the K – 12 marketplace. It’s called Voyage Arc™,

00:20 | Career Exploration as the Core Goal
the whole purpose of that project was around career exploration. So one of the things

00:25 | The Workforce Gap in Welding
happening in the trades, specifically around welding, is they have more people retiring than folks coming into that industry. So they want to get younger folks introduced to the industry and a role in what welding could look like- a career in welding could look like, through this virtual reality program. Welding is a tough thing to know just by looking at it, if you made a good weld.

00:51 | Shrinking Into the Weld: Real-Time Feedback
So one of the cool things we took advantage of is as you’re welding, when you want to learn about it, we can actually shrink you down to the size of the weld and give you pointers on how you did on – to distance, speed, quality of the weld. So it’s a fun way they’re learning, but they don’t really

01:08 | Scoring, Leaderboards & Helmet Skins
know they’re learning. Not only are you learning specifics about welding that are important, but they’re taking fun aspects, competitive aspects, and bringing in a scoring system, leaderboards. And as you earn points, you can earn skins on your welding helmet. So like any video

01:25 | The Amusement Park Reward
game, when that competitive nature gets going, the kids are having fun and they’re all fighting for that top spot. And then at the end, if they’ve welded correctly, they get to go into an amusement park and ride or ride. So it has a fun element at the end as well to tie a payoff to the work that they’ve done. Some of the things like welding or advanced manufacturing, it’s very costly for them

01:49 | Why Schools Turn to VR
to try and replicate what that could look like or send a student through, it may be too dangerous, or they just don’t have access to the equipment or facilities to make that happen. Those all start to be great use cases to start looking into VR. So tools like this can be a great way to give them

02:06 | VR as a Career Discovery Tool
that pretty much same experience and let them go through, work through challenges. Just understand, is it something that I want to pursue a career in? So I would say it’s a great opportunity just to leverage the technology on any of those fronts, quite honestly. We want to

02:23 | Work with Roundtable Learning
hear about potential use cases or challenges you have, whether it’s in the K-12 space, whether it’s in the enterprise space. Reach out to us on our website. It’s roundtablelearning.com. We have a lot of great videos on our YouTube page as well, which is under Roundtable Learning.

And you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Nick Day. I’m always happy to have a conversation. Reach out to me, and we’ll schedule something and find out if you have a good use case for VR.

See It Live

Schedule a personalized demo with our team and see PIT Trainer XR in action — customized to your environment.

Program Stats

Format: Custom Built VR for K-12

Headset: PICO 4E

Modules: 10

Analytics: Mercury XRS

Licensing: Unlimited Users