On an overcast afternoon in February, a biting wind swirled around the Quad as four undergrads sat in a semicircle in the Innovation Studio. They were engaged—taking notes and asking questions of the graduate students who stood nearby—but their focus was nearly 3,500 miles away in Cádiz, Spain, on the sunny southwestern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.
That’s where the team of four would be headed at the start of D-Term to complete their Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP)—after spending some time this day at WPI’s Global Lab, getting an introduction to the virtual reality technology that their project depended on.
Since the IQP became a signature part of the WPI undergraduate curriculum in 1970, students have drawn on technology to find solutions to real-world problems. But new technologies are emerging faster and faster these days—sometimes so fast that students haven’t ever used the kind of tech needed to complete the projects that IQP sponsors seek.
WPI turns those challenges into learning opportunities for students and backs them up with support systems and resources. One such resource, the Global Lab, has long-provided the campus community with hands-on training and troubleshooting for audio, video, and photography equipment. More recently the lab also began offering assistance with technologies that power extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, helping to fulfill WPI’s promise to equip students to be tech innovators of tomorrow.
“In applying these emerging technologies around the world in different contexts, our students really see the complications and complexities, which helps them develop expertise and an informed critical view,” said Stephen McCauley, director of the Global Lab.
Chatbot challenge
About 20% of IQP teams got some technical training at the Global Lab in the 2024–25 academic year. And while only six of those 52 trainings focused on XR technologies, the proportion of teams seeking similar help has shot up this year: Since A-Term, 11 of the 37 trainings the Global Lab has offered related to either augmented or virtual reality.
Fewer teams seek AI-related training from the Global Lab, but that isn’t a reflection of how many projects incorporate artificial intelligence in some way. Students are likely to already be familiar with AI tools that can help them organize information or strengthen their projects in the background. It’s still relatively rare, however, for IQP teams to develop an AI-based project deliverable because the resources required—in time and logistics—often far exceed what they can do in seven weeks.
Rare, but not unheard of.
When Allyson Sterling ’27 and her IQP teammates learned last fall that their project sponsor in Hangzhou, China, wanted them to build a prototype chatbot, they were excited by the challenge and turned to the Global Lab.
“None of us really had a strong basis for how we were going to approach making a chatbot,” said Sterling. On her team of three, she was the only computer science major and the only person with any, albeit minimal, experience training a chatbot. But building a chatbot from scratch? That was totally new. “I had no idea where to look for large language models or how to interact with existing pre-trained LLMs.”
Shikshya Shiwakoti, MS ’26, one of the Global Lab’s two AI specialists, pointed the team to existing resources with examples similar to what they wanted their chatbot to do. Their project sponsor runs an app that helps students learning English as a second language prepare for official placement tests. By explaining why an answer is incorrect and showing users where relevant information is located in their accompanying text, the chatbot Sterling’s team envisioned would add value beyond basic test prep programs that give simple answers only.
