Pioneering research promises to improve students’ performance in STEM subjects

Innovator Burkhard Wuensche has always been driven by a powerful sense of purpose. “For me, research is most interesting if it has an impact,” says Burkhard, a leading researcher in visual computing and a senior lecturer in Computer Science at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. “Solving real problems creates value for individuals, communities, and society at large.”

And real-world impact is exactly what Burkhard hopes to achieve with his latest endeavour, a research project titled “Spatial Skills Training for Improved Students’ Participation and Performance in STEM”. “I got the idea for the project from my work with university and school students,” he explains. “I realised that many students found simple tasks, such as describing or interpreting 3D scenes and movements, difficult. Further research showed that such spatial skills are fundamental for performance in STEM subjects, but that there are few interventions available for teaching such skills and that existing interventions usually require human instructors.”

Burkhard has partnered with pioneering game design and development studio Metia Interactive – known for weaving together universal themes and authentic representations of Indigenous Māori culture into its games – to develop software for spatial skills training. The research team will use visual and animation elements from Metia Interactive’s “Guardian Maia” 3D action-adventure game to study how spatial reasoning can be supported by an engaging, immersive, culturally competent and spiritual context.

Metia Interactive stood out as an ideal collaborator. “I read about Guardian Maia and was impressed by its innovative design blending interactive fiction, action-adventure gameplay, and Indigenous Māori storytelling,” recalls Burkhard. He reached out to Metia Interactive’s CEO, Maru Nihoniho, a fellow innovator equally passionate about education. Unsurprisingly, she was quick to come on board.

Rather than driving the game design, the researchers intend to use a co-design approach with mātauranga Māori experts and Māori students and educators. “We want to give the students a sense of ownership about the game,” explains Burkhard. “We found that rangatahi are often more creative than adults and they know best what type of game play will attract them and keep them engaged.”

Although other researchers have tried to develop games for spatial skills training, this project takes a novel approach, he adds. “We integrate spatial skills teaching and cognitive-load based automatic difficulty adjustment with adventure-style gaming, Indigenous Māori storytelling, and accurate representation of Māori mythology, tikanga (customs), and traditional weapons like the taiaha and mere.” The researchers will also investigate the use of unique mātauranga-informed metrics such as manawaroa (perseverance), māia (confidence or capability), and ihumanea (intuitiveness).

The potential impact of the research has attracted high-level recognition. The project was one of only 46 to secure funding from the 2025 Smart Ideas stream of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Endeavour Fund, New Zealand’s largest contestable fund. Smart Ideas funding specifically supports bold, innovative research with the potential to deliver transformative results – and Burkhard believes that improving NZ students’ participation and achievements in STEM subjects can deliver exactly that. “It’s crucial for attracting investments and high-tech companies, improving productivity, fostering entrepreneurship, and tackling global challenges such as reducing carbon emissions and adapting to climate change,” he notes.

In the long term, Burkhard is eager to explore other innovative applications of the research. Although it’s widely known that spatial reasoning skills are essential for everyday functioning, for example interpreting a map or navigating a new environment, recent research has also demonstrated that a reduction in spatial reasoning skills can be an early indicator of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. “We would like to adapt our game to be used as an early diagnosis tool for such diseases to improve treatment outcomes and disease management,” he says.

If this vision is realised, it wouldn’t be the first time that Burkhard’s research has enabled significant advances in health diagnostics. For his PhD studies, he worked with the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and the Centre for Advanced MRI to develop a toolkit for visualising biomedical tensor fields – mathematical representations of complex, multi-directional data – to better understand stresses and deformation of the heart muscle. “Researchers from the National Institutes of Health in the USA asked me whether I could also visualise Diffusion Tensor data in the brain,” he recalls. “This was easy using my toolkit, and I was able to reconstruct and visualise the nerve fibre structure in the brain from this data. Fibre tractography, as it’s now called, has become a common neuroimaging technique and is used for presurgical planning, diagnosis and monitoring, developmental neuroscience, and psychiatric studies.” Of the countless impactful projects he’s worked on during his career as an innovator, this remains the research he’s most proud of.

Burkhard’s participation in the Velocity programme delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) proved a similarly formative experience. He won the competition, then known as the Spark Entrepreneurship Challenge, with an innovation designed to simplify 3D modelling – but just as significant for his future career was learning the value of bringing together the right people. “A key takeaway was the importance of having a good team,” he reflects. “This is something I took to heart for this research project. Our team members have expertise and overlapping skill sets in Māori medium education, game design, game-based learning, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), VR, Cognitive Load measurement, pedagogy, and education technologies, and I’m proud to say that they are some of the best in New Zealand and even the world in their fields.”

In fact, the prospect of working with such a diverse and talented group of equally purpose-driven individuals excites Burkhard as much as the research itself. “I’m looking forward to being part of an amazing team and working with stakeholders such as schools and mātauranga Māori experts who are passionate about improving education outcomes,” he says. He’s also enthusiastic about working with students, hoping to “benefit from their creativity”. “Innovation often begins with reframing a problem – seeing it from the user’s perspective rather than the researcher’s perspective,” he observes. “This is often more challenging – but also more rewarding.”