Can you visit the countryside without leaving indoors?

Imagine a classroom where every wall opens onto a rural landscape. Around you, you can see fields, croplands, pastures, and flowering meadows. An audio guide begins telling stories about pollinators, soil organisms, and where food comes from. You sit comfortably on a cushion, discuss what you see with your group, and occasionally walk over to complete tasks on a touch screen.

In April 2026, twenty lower secondary school students from the Helsinki metropolitan area and the Forssa region took part in just such a virtual nature excursion. In a pilot project of the INTERACTIVE GARDENS initiative, the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) explored whether a virtual nature environment could serve as a learning platform for natural resource education and what opportunities it might offer alongside traditional teaching methods.

The destination of the virtual excursion was Elonkierto Park, an agricultural and livestock park in Jokioinen. The park is free of charge and open to everyone, offering visitors an opportunity to learn about topics such as cultivated plants, biodiversity, farm animals, and sustainable food production.

In the pilot, however, students did not travel to Elonkierto by bus. Instead, images and sound recordings collected in the park were combined with interactive tasks to create a virtual route. Students explored the route in Luke’s VirtuLab virtual nature facility on the Viikki campus in Helsinki. The participants were surrounded by 360-degree landscape images and videos projected onto the walls. Some of the motion-sensitive walls also functioned as large touch screens.

Working in small groups, the students visited six activity stations. An audio guide led them through the experience and explained topics such as pollination, genetic resources, and the importance of soil animals for food production. At each station, students solved a multiple-choice task together and received feedback from the audio guide.

Researchers observed how students interacted within the virtual room. The students quickly found their places on the cushions, took photos of the space, and explored the surrounding landscape. Once the story began, they listened attentively to the guide.

The students actively discussed the questions and justified their choices to one another. Everyone who wished had a chance to answer the touch-screen tasks. Enlarged images of unusual soil creatures projected onto the walls sparked spontaneous reactions and conversations.

Student feedback highlighted the calm and relaxed atmosphere of the virtual room. Most participants reported learning something new through the game. Topics that particularly captured their interest included the vast number of soil animals living in fields, the origins of food, pollinators, and different types of farm production. One student described the best aspects of the experience as follows:

You could press the answers yourself and decide on them. The 360-degree camera was also fun and created the feeling that you were actually there.

The students enthusiastically suggested numerous ideas for improving the game. They wanted to see Elonkierto during different seasons, and they hoped for more natural sounds, such as birdsong, during the virtual excursion. Some even imagined an animated earthworm video bringing the VirtuLab floor to life.

The feedback also revealed the need for balance. Some students would have liked to explore the topics in greater depth. At the same time, the game was considered fairly long, and the audio guide was perceived as somewhat too talkative. Effective virtual learning materials therefore need to provide sufficient information without becoming overly demanding or overwhelming.

The tasks embedded throughout the story helped structure the listening, maintain interest, and support concentration. According to the students, it was easier to focus on activities in the virtual room compared to the surroundings of a traditional classroom or a farm. One student reflected that the relaxed atmosphere may have stemmed from the fact that learning was not driven by the pursuit of grades.

The relaxed atmosphere may well have been because we weren’t at school and weren’t cramming for grades. Assessment often adds stress, so it was nice to study without any pressure and simply for the joy of learning.

Virtual nature cannot replace a real forest, park, or farm, nor can it replicate the experience of feeling the wind, smelling the environment, encountering changing weather, or meeting people and animals in person. At its best, however, it can spark curiosity and lower the threshold for exploring nature and understanding natural phenomena, helping young people make more sustainable everyday choices.

Some of the students who participated in the virtual excursion felt they would learn more on a real farm through multisensory experiences and hands-on activities. On the other hand, strong environmental stimuli such as loud noises, odors, and other distractions can present barriers to participation for some learners, as one student explained:

Outdoors there are many stimuli that can distract students, especially in large groups, from learning and concentrating. In the virtual room it is easier to be at peace.

A virtual excursion can complement traditional teaching. It provides an alternative when organizing travel to a farm or nature site is difficult. A virtual environment can also be used as preparation for an actual field trip or as a way to recall afterward what was learned.

Based on a small pilot involving 20 students, it is not yet possible to draw far-reaching conclusions about the effects of virtual learning. However, the students’ experiences serve as a reminder that a learning environment is more than just a place where teaching occurs. The setting, the atmosphere, and the mode of participation can all influence how students concentrate, engage in discussion, and feel confident enough to take part.

The pilot demonstrated that a virtual environment can combine nature education, gamification, collaborative problem-solving, and experiential learning. At the same time, a virtual implementation can make distant nature destinations accessible to students for whom organizing a physical visit would otherwise be difficult.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the pilot is that classroom teaching, outdoor learning, and virtual learning do not have to compete with one another. Instead, they can complement each other and open new pathways for different kinds of learners to understand the relationship between humans and nature, as well as related topics such as agriculture and food production.