Children at Guardian Tempe Use Interactive Book and AR App to Explore Bugs
The children at Guardian Childcare & Education Tempe have been exploring the world’s strangest creepy crawlies from the comfort of their Centre through an interactive story book and accompanying augmented reality (AR) app.
“One of our lovely families brought in a story book that uses AR recently, and we thought it was an amazing opportunity to introduce AR to our preschoolers,” shares Educational Leader, Kristina.
“We explained to preschoolers that it wasn’t an ordinary book, and that they would be able to interact with it in an exciting new way using augmented reality, or AR.”
“Of course, this caught their attention and they were immediately curious and excited to explore the book.”
“We explored life in the undergrowth, read amazing facts about the extraordinary insect world and came face to face with the biggest, scariest and weirdest bugs ever.”
Kristina explained the concept of AR to the children, sharing that it is an interactive experience of a real world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities.
After downloading the iExplore app onto one of the Educator’s phones, the Educators were able to activate the AR program for the book, which made 3D bugs appear on the phone screen.
“The preschoolers were absolutely fascinated and tried to work out how they were able to see the bugs walking around in their environment through the phone, but weren’t able to see it in real life,” says Kristina.
“The children loved taking photos of themselves with the bugs, and moved the phone screen around to capture the bugs at different angles and control their movements.”
“They came up with the idea of taking pictures of themselves holding the bugs as if they were real, and directed each other to sit or hold their hands a certain way to get the shot.”
The AR experience explored the learning outcome of: Children resource their own learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials.
“AR has great potential to be used with preschoolers because it changes the way children interact with the real world, enhances children’s engagement, and makes learning fun,” shares Kristina.
“It also expands children’s horizons and fosters their creativity and imagination, all while requiring very little materials or space.”
As a result of the positive AR experience, Kristina and the team are now looking into introducing further AR learning opportunities, and potentially VR experiences, so that the children can explore the world from their classroom.
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