Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
INTO THE FUTURE
Seventh-graders participate in augmented reality program organized by Google
LONDON GROVE » Seventh graders at Avon Grove Charter School took a giant educational leap into the future as they tried out an augmented reality program.
On Thursday, the members of the life science classes participated in this pilot program from Google that enables them to explore life forms and objects that exist in virtual but not physical space through cellphones provided by and programmed by Google.
Science teacher Jenny Burnett, who held the master phone with the program for her class, said it was “so cool.” She described it as similar to walking through the Franklin Institute Heart but in reality seeing it on a lab table.
The program is in its experimental stages and was brought to the charter school by Google consumer representative Jason Zen.
School Administrator Bryan Brutto said they obtained the opportunity to participate through application, just as they had two years ago with the virtual reality science program that involved wearing goggles that convey live sci-
ence images.
The students arrived at their morning class and found the cellphones with attached selfie sticks sitting on their work tables. Those phones were already programmed, and contained the images the kids were about to explore.
The students were immediately curious, excited and appeared eager to explore and touch them.
On their tables were papers that bore digital codes called QR codes, which, when scanned by the phones activated the program. Those designs on the papers operated like bar codes of objects for sale in stores.
Burnett, for her part was able to stand in the middle of the room and dictate through her phone what the students would see as they held their phones over the cards.
Looking at the screens on their phones, the students could move in-andout, around-and-in-back of the virtual objects. In the course of the morning they saw hearts, hair, sweat glands, eyes and more.
Burnett, as she delivered the images, became happily engaged when she realized she was connected to quite a long list of images that she could choose and send out to her students.
As someone who oversees a class involved in dissections of physical things like eyeballs and frogs, Burnett said a benefit of augmented reality was being able to explore many objects in a shorter time and enabling each student to control his or her exploration angles and curiosity.
When the students were asked for their reviews, many liked it very much.
One student said that the virtual reality they had tried two years ago made her dizzy, but this did not. She did, however, feel that it was a little inconvenient to zoom in and out by moving about.
Another student said he liked the virtual program from the past better because, “You can travel to other places.”
Brutto, who was in the classroom overseeing the one-day experiment, said it is important to expose the students to programs that are approaching in the future.
“Augmented reality will be part of life. If we don’t teach them, we’re putting them into a system they aren’t familiar with (in the future).
“This is going to be part of your lives,” Brutto told his students.
Jason Zen, the Google representative, brought 50 phones, which were used over the course of the day in the two seventh-grade science classrooms.