Anne Frank House VR | VR in the Classroom

Is it suitable for my class?

For teachers

Anne Frank House VR is a 20 to 25 minute guided walk through the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, rebuilt and furnished as it was between 1942 and 1944, with Anne Frank’s own words read aloud in the rooms she wrote them about. The museum that holds the building made it, first with Force Field VR in 2018 and then rebuilt for current headsets in 2024. It is free on Quest, PC VR through Steam, and PICO, and it needs no account and no internet connection once installed.

There are two modes. Story Mode is a narrated documentary: it moves you through the rooms in order, and it ends by telling you what happened to the eight people who hid there. Tour Mode lets you wander and triggers diary quotations when you look at things. Story Mode is the one to cast to a class. Tour Mode needs a task attached to it, or students drift.

A controlled study ran this exact app with 132 German students aged 12 to 17 (Mulders, 2023). Students in headsets liked it more and scored higher on perspective-taking than students who ran the same content on a laptop. They also learned less. Factual knowledge gains were lower in the headset than on the screen. In the same study, students given structured, segmented instruction learned significantly more than students left to explore freely.

Read plainly, that says: the headset gives you engagement and a felt sense of the space, and it costs you knowledge unless you supply the structure yourself. This app is not a lesson. It is 25 minutes of powerful raw material that only becomes a lesson if you frame it before, task it during, and debrief it after.

Practically, it is one of the easiest VR titles to run. Install once, go offline, no logins, nothing to save, seconds between students. The constraint is time: one student per headset per 25 minutes, so a whole class working individually is a two-lesson job unless you cast it instead.

For leadership

There is nothing to buy. The app is free on every platform, with no subscription, no in-app purchases, no seat licences, and no education edition to negotiate. Installing it across a whole headset fleet costs nothing and, because it needs no internet connection at run time, it does not add load to the school network or depend on the firewall.

Three things to weigh.

Data is a smaller question than usual but not a settled one. The app itself takes no account, creates no student data, and runs offline. The publisher’s company-wide privacy statement does describe diagnostics and analytics, including headset serial numbers, IP addresses and device data processed in the United States, but it does not name this title and it contains no children’s-data section and no minimum-age clause at all. If the school intends a fleet deployment with under-13s, that silence is worth a written question to Vertigo Games before rollout.

Safeguarding is the real governance item, and it is about content rather than data. This is Holocaust material and it carries a 3+ store rating with no content descriptors, which means the store gives a teacher no warning whatsoever. Whatever policy the school has for teaching the Holocaust should govern this app, and the entry recommends it from middle school upward for that reason, not because of the rating.

For students

You will stand inside the rooms where Anne Frank and seven other people hid from the Nazis for just over two years, furnished as they were at the time. The real building in Amsterdam is kept empty, so this is something you cannot see any other way. Anne’s own diary is read aloud as you go, and at the end you find out what happened to everyone who hid there.

It takes about 25 minutes. The controls are simple and there is a short tutorial at the start: you point at things to hear about them, and you step onto footprints on the floor to move from room to room. Nothing jumps out at you and there is nothing frightening to look at. What is difficult is the subject, and the fact that the rooms are small and dark and you are in them. If you want to stop, stop, and say so.

One thing to hold onto: the rooms are a reconstruction. Some of what you see is documented and some of it fills in gaps, and the app does not tell you which is which. Believing you now know what it was like is exactly the mistake worth avoiding.

Best for

Middle and high school history units on the Holocaust, the Second World War, or occupation and resistance
English lessons studying the diary as a set text, as a way of anchoring passages to the places they describe
Whole-class teacher-led sessions cast to a screen, which is the most reliable way to run it with one headset
Schools with a single headset and no budget, since it is free, offline and account-free
Students who cannot travel to Amsterdam or manage the Annex’s steep stairs
A media-literacy or historiography lesson about how historical reconstructions are built and what they claim

Not ideal for

Teaching factual content on its own: the one controlled study of it found the headset version produced lower knowledge gains than the same material on a screen
Unsupervised or self-directed use, which the same study found significantly less effective than structured instruction, and which is inappropriate for this subject matter anyway
Primary classes: Meta’s account rules exclude under-10s outright, 10 to 12 needs a parent-managed account a school cannot create, and the museum’s own physical site sets a minimum age of 10
Any lesson that needs a student artefact, since nothing is created, saved or exported
Close reading of documents inside the experience: the letters, wall writings and diary pages rendered in the environment are blurred and unreadable
Fast rotations: 20 to 25 minutes per student is the floor

Fit profile* 0 to 4 per area, assessed from the available evidence. There is no overall score.

Educational value 3/4

Curriculum flexibility 2/4

Classroom practicality 3/4

Engagement 3/4

Creation agency 0/4

Collaboration 0/4

Accessibility 2/4

Comfort 4/4

Privacy suitability 3/4

Value for money 4/4

Scalability 3/4

Evidence strength 3/4

What students do and learn

Learning objectives

Describe the physical conditions of hiding in the Secret Annex: the size of the rooms, the arrangement of the shared spaces, and the constraints of living silently in them for two years
Connect passages from Anne Frank's diary to the specific places they were written about
Explain what happened to the eight people who hid in the Annex and to the helpers who supported them
Evaluate a historical reconstruction as a source: what it is based on, what it fills in, and what it cannot tell you

Educational strengths

Free on every platform, offline once installed, with no account and nothing to save, which removes almost every logistical barrier that stops schools using VR
Shows the Annex furnished as it was, which the physical museum deliberately does not, so it adds something a school trip cannot
Short enough to fit a lesson: one pass is 20 to 25 minutes
Backed by an unusually direct piece of evidence: a controlled study of this exact app with 132 school students in the relevant age band
Casts well, so one headset can serve a whole class as a shared, teacher-paced experience
Made with the institution that holds the site, so the content authority is the museum rather than a game studio working from photographs

Students mainly experience witness, explore, visualize

Teaching approaches it suits* guided exploration, demonstration, experiential

How to assess it oral explanation, reflection, quiz, observation

Depth of integration* L4: curriculum embedded

Limitations and cautions check these before planning a lesson

The headset produced lower factual knowledge gains than the same content on a laptop screen in the one controlled study of it (Mulders 2023); the immersion buys engagement and perspective-taking, not knowledge

Free exploration produced significantly worse knowledge acquisition than structured, segmented instruction in the same study, so unfacilitated use wastes the lesson

Nothing is produced, saved or exported, so all assessment evidence has to be generated outside the app

No documentation distinguishes historically evidenced objects from objects that fill spatial gaps, so the reconstruction cannot be cited as a source without that caveat

In-world documents, letters and wall writings are blurred and unreadable, so the diary arrives as narration rather than as a text students can read

One user at a time for 20 to 25 minutes, which is the hard limit on any rotation plan

Controllers required, no hand tracking, and no seated mode listed by any store

Risks to plan for

High · content

This is Holocaust content delivered in an enclosed, darkened, confined space that the student cannot see out of, ending with the arrest of the eight people in hiding and what happened to them. There is no depicted violence and no store carries a content descriptor, so the store rating of 3+ gives a teacher no warning at all. The distress risk is the subject matter and the confinement, and a teacher cannot see a student's face while it is happening. Prepare students beforehand, tell them how to stop, watch them during, and debrief afterwards. Source

Moderate · content

Nothing in the app distinguishes objects that are historically evidenced from objects that fill spatial gaps, and the academic review of it states that on this basis 'we cannot say with certainty what in the project is based on historical facts and what emerged from the developers' imagination'. Students who take the reconstruction as documentary will leave with false confidence about details. Name the reconstruction as a reconstruction. Source

Moderate · safeguarding

Meta's platform rules place a floor under school use on the Quest route: children under 10 cannot have a Meta account at all, and 10 to 12 year olds need a parent-managed account, which a school cannot create on a parent's behalf. Separately, Vertigo Games' privacy statement contains no children's-data section and no minimum-age clause, so the publisher has said nothing either way about under-13 users. Neither constraint applies to the Steam PCVR route. Source

Moderate · privacy

The publisher's company-wide privacy statement documents diagnostics and analytics including VR headset serial code, IP address, pseudonymised username, user ID, usage location and device specifications, processed by Sentry.io in the United States and shared with Mailchimp and Gamesight. The statement does not name this title, so whether these apply to it is unconfirmed. Source

Moderate · physical

Moving between rooms requires the wearer to physically step onto footprints marked on the virtual floor, so this is not a stand-still experience. Each headset needs a clear area and an adult watching the wearer, especially given that the wearer is emotionally engaged and cannot see the room. Source

Low · technical

One Steam reviewer reports clipping through walls; no other technical faults were found. Source

Planning a lesson

With one headset* Strong

In pairs* Workable

With a small set* Workable

With a class set* Workable

Teacher preparation* Moderate

Student learning curve* Short

Classroom readiness* Ready with preparation

Casting to a screen* Good

Comfort risk* Low

Motion minimal*, physically minimal*. Comfort still varies by student.

Ways to run it teacher demo, station rotation, individual, pair rotation, small group

Runs on Quest 3, Quest 3S, Quest 2, Quest Pro, PC VR, SteamVR, PICO 4, Other standalone headsets

Players One at a time

Typical session: 20 to 25 minutes for one pass. The museum states about 25 minutes; a practitioner review times Story Mode at about 20 minutes; a Steam reviewer describes 24 minutes of narrated content. Classroom sessions in the Mulders (2023) study averaged about 30 minutes.
Lesson shapes that work: One 50 to 60 minute lesson for a cast Story Mode run plus a structured debrief
A two-lesson sequence when students run it individually: context and task first, headset rotation second, debrief and written response to finish

More planning detail: setup, saving, swapping students, spaceopen +−

Sensible maximum: One pass in one sitting. No developer maximum is published. The limit in practice is the lesson, not the headset.
Group size: One wearer at a time. For a cast demonstration, a whole class; for individual runs, plan on two to three students per headset per lesson.
Time to get started: Two to three minutes. The app opens with a short mandatory tutorial covering movement, the meaning of the on-screen symbols, and how to interact with objects.
Swapping between students: Under a minute. Nothing to log into, nothing to save, no settings to restore.
Setup: Install from the store on a headset with a Meta account. Because no internet connection is needed at run time, install once and the headsets can be offline afterwards. Set the language. Mark out a clear standing area per headset and set a generous guardian boundary, remembering that room changes require the wearer to step onto footprints on the floor. Decide which mode you are using and why. Prepare the debrief before the lesson, not after it.
Saving and progress: No profile, no save, no progress carried between sessions. Each run starts at the beginning. No in-app resume feature was found.
Passing the headset on: There is nothing to sign into inside the app and nothing to save, so the next student puts the headset on and starts from the beginning. Reset between users is a matter of seconds.
Reset and login burden: Very low. No app account and no per-student setup. The trade-off is that there is no record of what any student did, so evidence of learning has to be collected outside the headset.
Casting notes: No developer casting documentation was found, so this is a judgement about the app type rather than an observed result. Standard Quest casting applies. This app casts unusually well because the narration carries the content: a class watching a cast of Story Mode receives most of what the wearer receives, minus the sense of scale and confinement.
Space needed: A clear standing area. Both Meta and PICO list Roomscale and Standing as the player modes and neither lists Seated. Room changes work by fading to black and asking the user to step onto footprints, so a fixed chair position is unlikely to work; this was not confirmed on device.
Collision risk: Moderate. The user walks and turns inside a small virtual room while looking at objects, and must physically step onto marked footprints to move between rooms. In a classroom this needs a clear area and someone watching the wearer.
Cable risk: None on standalone Quest or PICO. Moderate on the Steam or Rift PC route, which is tethered unless wireless streaming is used.

Classroom implementation notesread +−

One headset first, and here that is not a compromise. Casting Story Mode to a screen with the teacher wearing the headset is arguably the best way to run this app in a classroom: the narration carries almost all the content, everyone experiences the same thing at the same time, the teacher can pause and talk, and nobody sits alone inside difficult material without an adult knowing what they are seeing. What the class loses is the sense of scale and confinement, which is the part that only the headset gives. A reasonable compromise is a cast run for everyone plus optional individual runs for those who want them.

For individual runs, the logistics are easy and the timing is not. There are no accounts, no saves and no network, so swapping students takes seconds. But 25 minutes each means two or three students per headset per lesson. With one or two headsets, plan a two-lesson sequence, or run the headset as a station while the rest of the class works on the diary text or the museum’s free browser 3D tour, which needs no headset and gives non-wearers real parallel work.

Space matters more than the short runtime suggests. Room changes work by fading to black and asking the wearer to step onto footprints on the virtual floor, so this is not a stand-still experience. Give each headset a clear area, set a generous boundary, and have an adult watching the wearer, who is both emotionally engaged and unable to see the room.

Whatever the model, the study result should shape the plan: structure beats exploration. Establish who the eight people were and what the building was before anyone puts a headset on. Give a specific task for during. Leave real time at the end, in the same lesson, for the debrief. Nothing comes out of the app, so any evidence of learning has to be created by you afterwards, which in practice means a written response, a discussion, or an explanation task.

Where it fits the curriculum each link shows how central it is, how confident the finding is, and what evidence supports it

Subjects

History Core use high confidence E4 formal research why? +−

The app exists to teach one historical site and the people who hid in it. There is a peer-reviewed controlled study of this exact app with 132 German middle-school students aged 12 to 17 (Mulders 2023), and the museum built it as part of its own educational work.

Ages: middle school and above; below that, platform account rules and the subject matter both bite

Sources: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti7030028 · https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/news-and-press/news/2018/6/12/anne-frank-house-vr-launched/