Bringing STEM to Life with an Immersive Learning Space in Hanau

Kyla Ball April 23, 2026

How Kathinka-Platzhoff-Stiftung used ThingLink to build an innovative STEM-focused immersive learning environment – and open it to the whole community.

Location: Hanau, Germany

Funded by: Google

Hardware Partner: Epson (projectors); Miri by Campustore (immersive space).

A Foundation Built on Educational Innovation

Kathinka-Platzhoff-Stiftung is an educational foundation in Hanau, Germany, with around 150 employees, working across childcare, primary schooling, and STEM education. With a long track record of giving young people hands-on research opportunities, the foundation has always sought to explore and innovate how learning can happen – not just in the classroom, but in everyday local and community spaces.

When the foundation’s leadership learned about immersive learning spaces through a conversation with Epson’s education specialists, a new idea began to take shape. There was an opportunity not only to enhance their STEM education offering, but also to reach new audiences who might never walk through the doors of a traditional science lab, or who may think that STEM is a subject that is either irrelevant or closed to them – by placing an immersive space at the heart of the city’s public library.

“We also had the idea to inspire new target groups about STEM via the immersive learning space – to get people interested in STEM who wouldn’t come to the lab to do research right now.”

Ralf Schlosser, STEM Leader, Kathinka-Platzhoff-Stiftung

Funded by Google and built with Epson projection hardware and a Miri immersive space, the project became one of the first of its kind in Germany dedicated to STEM education. It is located in Hanau’s Kulturforum public library, making it freely accessible to the whole community.

The Challenge: Making STEM Accessible – and Keeping it Meaningful

The foundation faced a dual challenge. First, how do you attract young people who are disengaged from traditional science education? And second, once the immersive space was built, what content would fill it – and who would create it?

The team also recognised a pressing social need: children in Hanau were growing up digitally connected but without adequate digital safety awareness. Parents, who had not grown up with smartphones or social media, were unable to guide their children effectively, leaving a significant gap in media literacy that schools were only beginning to address.

Creating rich, interactive learning experiences for an immersive environment requires a content platform that is genuinely easy to use – not just for educators, but for students themselves. The tool needed to combine simplicity of entry with enough depth to support serious educational goals.

ThingLink as the Content Engine for the Immersive Space

After evaluating options for content creation, the team chose ThingLink as the platform to power the immersive space. The decision came down to usability: ThingLink needed to be accessible enough for young students to build their own learning journeys, while offering the depth required for professionally produced educational content.

“ThingLink has a nice dichotomy: on the one hand it is totally user-friendly and the entry is really simple — but it also offers so much in terms of functionality that I can do more than just very simple things.”

Ralf Schlosser, STEM Leader, Kathinka-Platzhoff-Stiftung

Working with ThingLink’s content production team, the foundation developed two flagship learning journeys to launch the space (both resources are in German):

Kari Saves the Kinzig

An environmental journey following Hanau’s local river – from litter in the Kinzig through to the Main, Rhine, and North Sea. A topic children encounter in everyday life, designed to create emotional connection to environmental responsibility.

The Digital Me and Me

An interactive journey exploring online safety, touching on avatars, real names, microphone use, and privacy. Whilst revealing how little children understand about navigating the digital world safely, the resource also explores the opportunities available online for young people to learn digital, future-ready skills.

Bridging the Digital and Physical Worlds

A key feature of the foundation’s approach is bridging digital and physical worlds. ThingLink content in the Miri immersive space was designed to require students to consult physical resources in the surrounding library to unlock the next step – creating a seamless loop between analogue and digital learning. Indeed this reflects the core, founding principle of ThingLink, which was originally envisioned as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds, allowing anything to become an interface for learning.

Because ThingLink content is platform-agnostic – viewable in the immersive space, on VR headsets, on desktop browsers, or mobile – it also gives the foundation a simple way to share its approach with other institutions that do not yet have an immersive space of their own.

Learning that Engages, Connects, and Scales

The main benefits of the project are summarised here:

New audiences reached

Situating the Miri immersive space in the public library brought STEM to children and families from all social backgrounds who would not typically visit a science centre.

Collaborative group learning

Unlike VR headsets, the shared immersive space prompted spontaneous teamwork, negotiation, and communication among students who had never met.

Digital literacy gap exposed

The Digital Me and Me journey immediately revealed that children lacked basic online safety instincts – validating the need for exactly this type of intervention.

Student-led content creation

ThingLink’s low barrier to entry means students can become content creators themselves – producing learning journeys on topics they care about.

“The combination of immersion and interactivity is what really stimulates learning – it draws you into a world and manages to create an emotional connection with the learning content.”

Ralf Schlosser, STEM Leader, Kathinka-Platzhoff-Stiftung

Looking Ahead

The foundation is now planning workshops for educational partners across Germany, using ThingLink to demonstrate how other institutions can begin content creation – with or without their own immersive space. Immersive Spaces and the ThingLink-powered learning journeys are the centrepiece of the upcoming national student research centre conference, hosted in Hanau.

Looking further ahead, the team envisions city-wide learning experiences – students navigating Hanau’s streets, photographing findings, and contributing to collaborative ThingLink projects that blend local history, archive photography from 1900, and the living city of today.