By Mark Kelly | Alabama News Center
Growing up near Virginia’s Atlantic Coast, in what she describes as “a challenging environment” that included being homeless for a time at the age of 15, Kai Frazier developed an interest in history.
Over time, she also came to understand that her future, as well as those of her classmates and millions of other children across the country, was limited by a lack of access to learning opportunities, such as field trips and other hands-on experiences, due to disparities in funding and material support.
“I didn’t have many resources,” Frazier recalled about her childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s. “There was no tech that I used. I never saw a college campus until I was actually enrolled in college. I thought about what life could be like if I’d had more opportunities to learn about different places, explore the world.”
Those thoughts planted a seed that grew eventually into Kai XR, a promising startup that is part of the thriving innovation community in Birmingham. Frazier founded the company in 2018, motivated by the desire to expose students to learning opportunities she missed — and to help ensure their ability to take advantage of them.
Kai XR is an education platform that uses virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) to provide engaging lessons and experiences for students. Focused on children in third through fifth grades, the platform includes virtual field trips to locations across the globe and 3D building projects designed around the knowledge and skills needed to improve educational outcomes and future job prospects.
“It’s about making learning apply to students’ everyday lives, exploring careers and solving real-world problems,” Frazier explained. “We focus on STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and use VR/XR to encourage creativity, collaboration and problem solving.
“This platform gets kids excited about learning.”
Studying history and education at Virginia Commonwealth University in the mid-2000s, Frazier had remained intrigued by the idea of improving educational outcomes in underserved schools. Her interest — and her determination to do something about it — grew after she earned her degree and entered the teaching profession.
Closing Gaps
As a seventh and eighth grade history teacher in northern Virginia, Frazier repeatedly encountered the same lack of resources she remembered in the schools she grew up in. There was little to no money to afford buses for field trips or fund in-school extracurricular programs and activities. Access to equipment and materials to enhance instruction and learning was limited. These circumstances caused frustration for students and teachers alike, Frazier said, recalling as an example how few of the videos available to her history classes were up to date.
“A lot of black-and-white historical footage, black-and-white photos and textbooks,” Frazier recounted. “Kids just fell asleep in class all the time. We did not have the tools to keep them engaged and excited.
“Imagine,” Frazier added, “You’re in northern Virginia, 20 minutes away from D.C. and all the free federal museums, and you don’t have the money to pay for a bus to get schoolkids there. As a history teacher, it was a little insulting to me that I could not take my students to the National Museum of American History.”
Technology helped close some of the gaps, but accessibility was a huge obstacle, one that Frazier said was dealt with mostly by improvising. Her school adopted a bring-your-own-device policy, encouraging students who had laptops, tablets or smartphones to bring their own to class.
“That was in the days before everyone had their own device,” Frazier said. “So, we would have two or three kids sharing a device. We ran class on 5G signals and smartphones. Any tool we had to find ways of bringing history to life and making those connections that help students understand and relate to what they’re learning.”
Enlarging Her Toolbox
Looking to enlarge her toolbox, Frazier took on extra work with jobs at the same museums her students were unable to visit. Working at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, she was exposed to VR for the first time — the point at which her long-simmering ideas about technology and learning came together in the idea that became Kai XR.
Deciding to make developing her business concept a full-time job, she sold her house, car and most of her possessions, moving across the country to Oakland, California, and the fertile startup climate of Silicon Valley. There, she would spend six years “learning everything I could about technology, the trade of business, the necessities of starting a successful business.” She also saw the power of innovation and ideas, receiving encouragement from others who had followed the entrepreneurial path.
And she became a founder.
“In D.C., when I told people I was moving to the Bay Area to start a company, they told me I was crazy,” Frazier said. “In the Bay, people told me I wasn’t dreaming big enough.”
Frazier visited Alabama initially in 2022, when she was invited to speak at the inaugural Future of Learning Summit produced by Ed Farm, the Birmingham-based digital resource for community education. Both the event and the city struck a chord.
“It was beautiful,” Frazier said. “I met a roomful of engaged and ready-to-learn educators who wanted to know all they could about tech and using technology in the classroom.”
Traveling To Birmingham
For more than a year afterward, Frazier traveled back and forth to Birmingham several times, building relationships with fellow educators using her tools — Birmingham City Schools began using the platform, along with I3 Academy, the K-5 charter school in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood — and interacting with prospective investors and accelerators for Kai XR. After connecting with gener8tor and other resources — including partnerships with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, Regions and Alabama Power — she brought the company to Alabama in 2023.
Asked for stories about how the Kai XR lesson platform works, Frazier shared two recent examples from Birmingham’s W.J. Christian K-8 School. One was a “learning adventure” about the differences between renewable and nonrenewable energy sources that included a virtual field trip to a wind farm across the globe in Jordan and a 3D maker space where students built their own wind-powered community.
Frazier’s other example was a virtual visit to Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where students learned how STEM skills are applied in careers at NASA. They also heard from an aerospace engineer working on the rocket launcher that eventually will take people, equipment and supplies to Mars.
A special focus for Kai XR has been in Alabama’s historically underserved Black Belt region. In the platform’s first year of use in numerous schools across the region, notable improvements in STEM skills were achieved. Frazier wants to build on that success by expanding into other rural areas of the state, noting that 50 of Alabama’s 67 counties fall under that definition.
“We want to be where we can make the biggest impact in education, especially in Alabama,” Frazier said. “We knew we wanted to be in Birmingham and Montgomery, but we’ve seen that the need is greatest in a lot of rural communities.”
“Time To Scale”
Being in position to address more of that need is part of the growth plan for Kai XR, said Frazier, who added emphatically, “It is time to scale.” Filling workforce gaps is both a need and an opportunity for Alabama, she said, noting the “bigger conversations” taking place in the public and private sectors about making the investments necessary to increase the competitiveness of students from rural areas. Through its growth, Kai XR wants to continue to be part of that solution.
Meanwhile, Frazier and the company continue to expand their presence. Currently, Frazier is at work on a VR film project in Birmingham, with students as storytellers using VR/XR technology. Kai XR is also working on a project with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, with BCRI assisting with guidance and research for a VR project focused on the 1963 Children’s Crusade that was a pivotal episode in the civil rights movement. The immersive experience will debut on June 26 as part of Birmingham’s upcoming Sloss.Tech conference, with Frazier participating in a panel discussion to follow.
Frazier believes that Kai XR is positioned to grow as a company while expanding its impact on education in both rural and urban settings in Alabama and beyond. In addition to seeing her idea for helping students and teachers become a reality, she said, the real reward is seeing the impact of Kai XR on the classroom experience.
“It’s great seeing the kids grow deeper in the platform, seeing learning come to life for them,” Frazier said. “And as an educator, the greatest compliment I can receive is seeing teachers use it in a daily way and hearing what it is meaning to them.
“That keeps me inspired.”
