In times of growing social fragmentation, music education is increasingly challenged to create spaces of unity, inclusion, and participation. The ISME conference theme “Unity in Music Education: Building Bridges for All” emphasizes music as a universal language that transcends barriers. In this context, we explore the potential of extended reality (XR) technologies for collaborative music education through PatchWorld, a VR-based musical sandbox that positions itself as a step in the global development of the musical metaverse (Turchet, 2023). Within a unique virtual environment learners interact as avatars, create and manipulate sounds, improvise, and collaboratively invent and produce music. The integration of PatchWorld into music education can foster social presence, motivation, and self-efficacy while enabling inclusive participation, as virtual instruments and avatars help reduce traditional barriers to music-making. We designed, tested, and evaluated learning-designs following a design-based research approach (McKenney & Reeves, 2018), integrating theoretical models such as TPACK (Mishra & Köhler, 2006) and process-product-didactics/mev (Wallbaum, 2009, 2018). While the latter highlights the importance of aesthetic experiences and the relationship between processes and products, SEPACK.digital (Frederking, 2022) illustrates competence orientation further, highlighting subject-specific knowledge and the inclusion of learners’ everyday worlds. The iterative evaluation cycles were conducted in professional development events across Germany in 2024 and 2025. The evaluated data include semi-structured qualitative observation (Cohen et al., 2018), group discussions (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr, 2014), and related qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2022), as well as quantitative survey results (Oehler et al., 2025). The results highlight how learning-designs in music pedagogy can be developed holistically, considering learners’ perspectives, interests, motivation and social contexts. PatchWorld addresses the latter by connecting learners to a global user community, offering opportunities for transcultural collaboration and networked creativity. Embodied interaction and social presence (Bruns et al., 2024) are as well emphasized within PatchWorld, unlike traditional digital audio workstations (DAWs). These features position the platform as a technological bridge for networked music interaction, linking informal youth practices (e.g., gaming, social VR) with formal educational settings. The poster presents our findings on PatchWorld as an educational sandbox and platform that supports music education by: - enabling new forms of networked music interaction in XR settings, - fostering inclusive and participatory access to creative expression, and - connecting cultural, social, and technological dimensions of music-making. By embedding PatchWorld in music education, we argue for XR as a means to bridge communities, foster empathy, and prepare learners for collaborative futures in music and beyond.