Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, have developed a virtual reality and artificial intelligence-based system that can identify whether an 11 or 12-year-old child needs academic support, potentially weeks or months before school report cards. Unlike conventional tests, the system analyses how children arrive at answers by capturing behavioural cues such as response time, number of attempts and types of mistakes while completing short academic tasks in a virtual environment. The findings, published in the journal Child Neuropsychology, involved 120 school students aged 11 to 12 years who wore a VR headset and completed tasks including simple mathematics problems, reading a clock, counting dots and building words from scrambled letters. The assessment took around 15 minutes. Using teacher assessments as the benchmark, the best-performing Random Forest model predicted whether a child would be rated below average, average or above average with 95% accuracy. Prof M Manivannan said the system is frugal by design for use in schools across the Global South, with the bigger goal to catch learning gaps early. The VR tasks were based on Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.