Vocational students collaborating in a modern classroom

IES Santa Bárbara

Aula ATECA in action: how IES Santa Bárbara modernised its Health VET training with VR

Public healthcare training school · Málaga, Spain

3: programmes
1: classroom

The context

A respected vocational school facing a very real bottleneck

IES Santa Bárbara is a public vocational training school in Málaga, Spain, well regarded for its health-related programmes. Its courses prepare students for careers as care assistants, in clinical laboratories and in dental prosthetics — roles where you learn by doing, not just by reading.

The school's challenge was twofold. The healthcare job market is going digital fast, so graduates need to feel at home with new tools. At the same time, demand for hands-on practice was high — and that practice traditionally depends on getting students into real clinical settings, which is never guaranteed and never enough.

Students in a healthcare classroom rehearsing clinical care on a training manikin

The challenge

How do you give every student authentic practice — without depending only on the hospital?

Clinical placements are valuable, but they are limited: there are only so many beds, patients and supervised hours to go around. When practice depends entirely on them, some students get plenty of repetitions and others barely get any. The school wanted a way to deliver safe, authentic and effective training that did not rely solely on access to a real clinic.

In practical terms, the school needed to solve three things at once:

Let students rehearse risky or high-stakes procedures as many times as they need, with zero risk to anyone
Make the practice feel real, not like a slideshow or a quiz
Equip teachers — not just students — so the technology becomes part of everyday lessons

What we built

A purpose-built technology classroom, designed hand in hand with the teachers

Together with IES Santa Bárbara, MetaMedicsVR fitted out an applied-technology classroom — known locally as the ATECA classroom — and laid it out in flexible zones so groups can move between activities and work in different ways.

Inside, the classroom combines immersive simulation with hands-on maker tools:

A full virtual-reality CPR simulator — CPR being the chest-compression technique used to revive someone whose heart has stopped — so students can repeat the procedure until it becomes second nature
Interactive anatomy software, co-designed with the school's own teachers, to explore the human body in 3D
Clinical scenarios adapted to healthcare-assistant training, so the cases match what these students will actually face at work
Virtual-reality headsets, 3D printers, scanners and advanced sound and display systems
Dedicated training for the teaching staff, so they can weave every tool naturally into their lessons

Co-designing the anatomy software with the faculty mattered: the people who teach the course every day know exactly which ideas students struggle with, and the tools were shaped around those real gaps rather than a generic template.

A student wearing a virtual reality headset during an immersive training session

How it works

Practice first in a safe, repeatable space — then carry it into the real world

In the classroom, a student puts on a headset and steps into a scenario — for example, responding to someone in cardiac arrest. They can run it again and again, make mistakes safely, and build the muscle memory and confidence that only repetition gives you. A teacher guides the session and connects each step back to the wider course.

The maker side of the classroom works the same way. With the 3D printers and scanners, students and teachers can produce physical models and parts to study and handle, while the interactive anatomy software lets a whole group turn a structure around on screen and see how the pieces fit together. Learning stops being something you only read about and becomes something you can touch, rotate and try.

Simulation does not replace real clinical experience — it prepares students for it. By the time they reach a real placement, the basics already feel familiar, so they can focus on the patient instead of fighting with the procedure.

Hands practising chest compressions on a CPR training manikin

The impact

A model the school sees as repeatable across its programmes

The classroom now serves students across the school's health-related programmes, and the school describes the approach as a replicable model — a blueprint other vocational centres could follow rather than a one-off experiment.

The technology classroom is the engine of the new vocational training. With simulators like these, learning becomes more real, more active and better connected to the professional world.

If you recognise your own situation here, let's talk about how it could work for you.

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