Learning with AR and cubes

Hi there! I wanted to share a project in which I am involved for about 5 years. It is called PleIQ (pleiq.com/en) and it is an educational toy that works with Augmented Reality to help children develop skills (language, math, music, etc). Basically, it is a set of 8 blocks/cubes that can be scanned with an app (free btw) to display AR content.

Five years ago we realized that most of the school classrooms still use traditional blocks of letters and numbers as a tool to teach different curriculum-based activities (mostly related to language and math). So we reimagined the concept and make new blocks are lightweight, with round edges (to prevent the common accidents) and also can generate sounds (which are useful to music-related activities).

We are a small team of people from different South American countries (most of us reside in Santiago, Chile). In this part of the world, most countries have educational systems that haven't change much over the last 30 years. While there have been some good investments in technology for education, it is uncommon to see a proper plan to use that technology in classrooms.

Some teachers don't even know how to use a smartphone and they developed a sort of fear of technology, they think it is only a distraction for children that prevents them to develop social skills; so at the end, children are left alone with devices (bought by its parents) and they used only to play. On the other side, there are many educators that understand the technology and its benefits instead of rejecting it by default.

We think technology can be used to improve early childhood education. We have seen how children collaborate to complete learning activities, and how they actually learn while playing, especially when the content is interactive, immersive, and the experience of learning is closer to reality (which is harder to get using traditional books). Of course, none of this should replace the real-life experiences in the learning process, instead, we should make it easier for that to happen.

Our goal is to create an educational toy that takes advantage of technology and supports teachers at schools and parents at homes. We have done a lot of in site validations with children in preschool age (on classrooms) and we learned a lot from them.

TL;DR: If you want to learn more about PleIQ, here is a link: pleiq.com/en

❤️

Submitted November 15, 2019 at 06:40AM by avenadulce https://ift.tt/2KkoOAT