Empowering Special Education Through Student-Created Interactive Learning

Kyla Ball January 20, 2026

For students at Spesia vocational and special education college, ThingLink isn’t just a learning platform, but a tool for designing and building their own interactive experiences. Not only do their fellow students benefit from these engaging and immersive learning environments, but the student creators graduate with a set of powerful, future-ready, digital and learning design skills, ready to be used across a diverse range of industries and roles.

The Digital Learning Challenge for Special Education Colleges

Special education institutions face unique and complex challenges when adopting digital learning tools:

• A wide variation in learner abilities, including physical, cognitive, and communication-related disabilities, requires platforms that are flexible and inclusive by design.
• Traditional digital tools often limit student agency, positioning learners as content consumers rather than creators.
• Introducing advanced technologies such as VR, AR, and AI can be difficult in special education contexts if tools are not intuitive or accessible.
• Educators need edtech platforms that support experiential learning, while remaining easy to adopt across multiple student groups, workshops, and courses.
• Ensuring equal participation is critical – every learner must be able to create something concrete and meaningful, regardless of ability level.

Special education institutions, whether in K-12, Further or Higher Education – therefore require solutions that combine accessibility, creativity, and real-world relevance without adding technical complexity.

Case Study: Spesia Vocational College

Spesia Vocational college is a special education institution in Finland with around 1500 students across 4 main sites, catering for young people and adults who need individual support in their studies. Educator Marja-Liisa Valkamo showed how ThingLink can be used as both:

• A learning environment, and
• A platform for student-driven interactive content creation which develops demonstrable digital literacies and skills.

Students Create Interactive ThingLink Content in the Digilab

ThingLink was embedded across workshops and courses in Spesia’s Digilab, where students actively created immersive, interactive learning experiences rather than passively engaging with static materials. Three notable examples are:

The Haunted Cleaning Mission is an escape room game with a Halloween twist, designed for Spesia’s cleaning sector students and created by a 3rd year IT students using ThingLink Scenario Builder. The goal of the game is to answer professional questions related to cleaning as you transition from room to room.

A virtual tour of Spesia Järvenpää’s recycling point, where donated items are refurbished to resell. The presentation was created by a final-year business student in the Digilab as part of their course, and was also entered for the Business category of the national Taitaja2025 vocational skills competition.

A third-year information and communication technology student created this Mathematics Escape Game (below) during their internship in the Spesia Digilab in spring 2024, using various AI applications, and built with ThingLink Scenario Builder. The aim of the game is to answer mathematics questions posed in the interactive hotspots, collecting numbers needed for the final code to escape.

As Marja-Liisa Valkamo describes:

“It is very difficult to implement this kind of learning in such an engaging way by any other means. ThingLink made it possible to combine knowledge and emotions into an impactful learning experience.

Thinglink enables experiential learning, especially in VR environments, where it is my absolute favorite among digital platforms. ThingLink has been used in all our student groups’ workshops and courses in the Digilab. It can be used in so many ways and is easy to adopt. So far, students have created about 300 implementations. All experiences have been positive. Every learner has been able to create something concrete.”

Marja-Liisa Valkamo, Educator in Special Education

The Benefits of Using ThingLink in a Special Education Context

Using ThingLink to create these multimedia immersive learning experiences delivered measurable and meaningful benefits:

Universal participation, and in particular inclusive content creation for all learners

Every learner – regardless of disability – was able to create interactive content, reinforcing confidence, autonomy, and ownership of learning. Students with physical and cognitive disabilities successfully created videos, audio, images, and interactive images. One student with significant physical limitations and oral communication challenges excelled by mastering ThingLink and contributing digital resources that inspired other student groups.
In this way, ThingLink enhanced inclusion and accessibility, supporting diverse learning needs and enabling students to demonstrate skills beyond traditional written or verbal assessments. In addition to Immersive Reader accessibility tool, new ThingLink accessibility features like the Accessibility Player, plus additional languages available for content translation, have been added over the last few years.

Development of future-ready vocational skills

Students practiced creativity, digital communication, storytelling, and problem-solving; skills essential for modern workplaces and digital internships. Each piece of content acts as stand-alone testament to experience and expertise as an interactive media creator and learning designer – valuable skills applicable across a wide spectrum of industries.

High student engagement and motivation through experiential learning resources

ThingLink enabled students to explore, as well as design, build and annotate realistic 360-degree images and environments. This provided hands-on, experiential learning – particularly impactful for learners who benefit from visual learning and spatial approaches. VR-based experiential learning and interactive creation increased enthusiasm and sustained engagement across all student groups, which has been proven to improve knowledge and skill retention.

Proven scalability and sustainability of the learning technology across student groups and devices

With approximately 300 student-created implementations, ThingLink proved to be a reliable, adaptable education technology platform.

ThingLink’s intuitive interface made it easy to implement consistently across multiple workshops and courses, allowing students to work independently and collaboratively. The ThingLink learning materials were shared both via virtual reality headsets and on ipads, but could also be viewed on any student device of choice – increasing confidence and inclusivity for all.

AI-supported creativity

Using Skybox AI, students created rich ThingLink scenarios such as escape rooms, language-learning environments, and subject-specific simulations. These projects demonstrate how artificial intelligence can support creativity and self-expression in special education settings.

Empowering Every Learner to Create Meaningful Digital Content

This case highlights how ThingLink functions as more than a digital tool in special education institutions. By enabling experiential learning and student-created interactive content, ThingLink supports inclusion, creativity, and meaningful participation – ensuring that every learner can create powerful digital content. From escape rooms, virtual field trips, and now even augmented reality overlays to real-life objects, students can demonstrate future-ready skills as well as their own creativity.

More Further and Vocational Education Case Studies