Roel Koopman is a teacher at Baudartius College in Zutphen, Holland and he has been using SketchUp and ARmedia to let children learn 3D modeling and visualization. What follows is an interesting case study that shows how Augmented Reality is becoming an essential part of best practices in Education.
The teacher prepared a number of lessons with some assignments. Each child was given the task to model a building. Then they were given the additional group task of designing together a whole neighobourhood using the building models they created during the first task. Required modifications were then fed back to the design of the buildings. Besides helping developing children spatial and design skills the ARmedia software helped them acquire new skills in immersive visualization. This is something that children seem to really appreciate.
With the words of Roel Koopman: “Students are 12 – 13 years old and they are making a street with different buildings. Every child gets a different assignment. Together they make homes, a hospital, a store etc. They model the buildings in Google Sketchup and use AR to see the changes they make while they are building. They have to learn how to use the right scale, math and so on. They also have to talk to their ‘neighbours’ in the street to see if the buildings will look good in the street. (Maybe I don’t want a purple building next to my store for example…). Once the buildings are created, I assign every building to a different marker and place them in the street. When I “walk” with my webcam through the street we can see everything looks and maybe some adjustments have to be made. The children enjoy the assignment very much and they do it all by themselves. The AR makes the assignment more engaging. They love it.”
The video below (in Dutch) shows Roel in action with his students. Really nice video.
You can also download the case study (in Dutch) from here:
This post is also available in: Italian
