Since the second half of this year, officials from education offices and district education support offices from across the nation have been visiting the Realworld Seongsu offline space in succession. Korea has 17 education offices nationwide with 176 district education support offices under them, and we're seeing a continuous stream of scheduled group visits by superintendents and teachers almost daily. At this rate, it seems like most educational institutions will visit Realworld. When we inquired about this trend, we learned it stems from the Ministry of Education's initiative to strengthen AI education in elementary, middle, and high schools, aiming to enhance teachers' AI utilization capabilities and provide direct experience with digital-based lesson design and actual examples of future educational spaces. As Realworld gains recognition as an experiential content space utilizing PhygitalAI, it's receiving positive evaluations from the education sector as a reference for AI-powered immersive learning and participatory classroom models. We hope that the day will come when all 5 million students across 120,000 elementary school classes and 50,000 each of middle and high school classes will experience Realworld, and we're sharing this news from the field!
As a result, this space that was previously dominated by visitors in their teens and twenties now sees tour buses lining up from early morning, creating the unique scene of older teachers experiencing games together.
Truthfully, we were initially concerned. The very fact that teachers were visiting this space to experience 'games' felt somewhat unfamiliar. We worried whether they would be able to enjoy it and whether the processes requiring critical thinking and observation skills might feel burdensome. However, these concerns proved unfounded. As soon as the teachers started, they were running around the space shouting "Found a clue here!" and "Let me scan this QR code!" They would sit on the floor to solve puzzles and high-five each other when discovering hidden hints in AR screens. When the final puzzle was solved, their cheers were so enthusiastic you couldn't tell if they were teachers or students. In fact, they seemed to be enjoying it even more than the kids!^^
What Should Education Do in the AI Era?
In the special lectures and discussions held before and after the experiences, I always ask questions because I'm curious about how teachers view AI from their perspective. The teachers' answers to these questions are clear: what AI can never replace is education as a 'companion who thinks together, empathizes, and experiences alongside students.'
"Today's students learn independently through digital technology, rapidly acquire information, and remain within algorithm-provided personalized content. However, their interactions with others are decreasing proportionally, and opportunities to express or coordinate emotions are noticeably diminishing. Moreover, there's a growing tendency to separate social issues as 'someone else's problem rather than mine.' This is a generation that has learned distancing before connection, even when facing problems our community must address together—climate crisis, war, hatred, discrimination, school violence. Answer-oriented and efficiency-focused education stops thinking, and delivery without experience fails to evoke emotions."
For these reasons, schools are showing increasing interest in milestone education and Social Emotional Learning (SEL). The role of teachers is needed not just to 'know' the topics we all must face together, but to engage in dialogue with students, explore together, and find solutions in the process. Not merely as deliverers, but as designers and facilitators who can draw out such collective concerns. While tools like GPT can create lesson materials, 'making students experience' is an entirely different dimension of approach.
Focus on PhygitalAI for Planning and Delivering Direct Experiential Content
Therefore, teachers wanted AI as a facilitator that could easily design various topics into mission-based stories, share them with other teachers, and help students experience them directly in school settings—and this led to their visits to Realworld. Realworld's AI solution can easily reconstruct story-based missions to fit actual school situations in just a few minutes and transfer them to 'moving classes' utilizing various school spaces like classrooms, hallways, libraries, and playgrounds.
Teachers from across the nation speak of 'possibilities' rather than deficiencies through technological advancement. Empathy, social relationships, collaborative problem-solving skills. As these abilities are noticeably declining each year, the biggest topic in school settings is actually how to restore 'humanity.' The Ministry of Education's large-scale budget investment in Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and expansion of milestone education during the semester are also extensions of this concern.
Therefore, we earnestly hope educational authorities will focus not on "how many more AI class hours to add" but on "what kind of experiences to design with AI." Rather than teaching digital AI separately, we desperately need the imagination to transform classrooms, schools, and furthermore, society as a whole into living, breathing learning spaces through Phygital AI.
This trend goes beyond simple technology utilization—it's a reflection on and practice of educational essence. The current movement in Korean education is presenting a new direction that leads the world. We believe that Phygital AI-based educational innovation can unfold the possibility for K-Education to become the vanguard leading global educational change.
Today's experience letter: What's irreplaceable in the AI era is empathy and experience!
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