The Gyeongbuk Provincial Office of Education in South Korea opened the Dokdo Metaverse on 15 August 2024, Liberation Day, as a new service of its Cyber Dokdo School. The 3D virtual Dokdo environment gives students an interactive way to learn about the islets, replacing the one-way communication of the school's website with a two-way teaching space.
How it works
Students explore a virtual Dokdo as avatars, on school computers or, for more immersive content, with VR headsets. Content covers how to get to Dokdo, its ecosystem and guard unit, its history and geography, and educational games that combine games students enjoy with Dokdo themes. A virtual roller coaster through a realistic Dokdo environment is among the experiences offered.
For classroom use, teachers can create learning spaces in the metaverse and manage their students there, and special exhibition spaces support live online lessons. Photographs from the launch coverage show students in a school computer room, each working in the 3D environment while the same view is projected at the front of the room.
Superintendent of Education Im Jong-sik said the platform would show a new world of Dokdo education that goes completely beyond the paradigm used until now.
Continued use in 2026
The Office of Education scheduled the 2026 Cyber Dokdo School Dokdo Day online festival for 19 to 30 October 2026, open to students and staff nationwide and to the public. One of its four programmes, Cyber Dokdo Metaverse Ranking 50, takes place in the virtual space's mission hall and game zone, where participants learn Dokdo-related knowledge. The Office reported that the Cyber Dokdo School as a whole, in its fifth year, has recorded 3.09 million cumulative visitors and 32,400 completers; these figures cover the whole school, not the metaverse alone.
