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Interactive Media Young people & museums

Augmented reality and primary school learning

Interesting piece from NestaLab in the UK.

For the first project, Adrian’s team worked with BBC Jam, the new interactive learning service for 5-16 year-olds. BBC Jam’s literacy team had come up with a story, written by Rob Lewis, called Looking for the Sun, about some creatures on a beach trying to find the sun after it has disappeared behind a cloud. The team worked with animations and interaction designers to build a proof-of-concept based on the story that could be used in primary schools. The idea was that, with the use of an interactive whiteboard and a webcam, a teacher could guide a group of children interactively through the story. “It works very like a mirror,” says Adrian. “You have the webcam placed above the screen. So as you move to the left it moves with you. As you move closer things get bigger, and as you move further away things get smaller.”

and

.It is also a much more collaborative technology than traditional ICT. When primary school teachers work with children, they usually get them to do a lot of moving around and acting out stories, but when it comes to ICT, children end up sitting at a PC and working alone. AR enables eight or nine children to work together at a whiteboard, says Adrian: “It offers a highly stimulating way of moving beyond the keyboard and a solitary learning place.”