Throughout a majority of the first 3 quarters of the school year, I have had the pleasure of working with Kai Fan, a senior at BFA Fairfax, on an augmented reality (AR) sandbox that will be used by classroom teachers and students in grades PreK-12 for years to come. You may have had some experience with this type of tool if you have visited the Echo Leahy Center for Lake Champlain on the Burlington waterfront. A powerful computer is connected to a camera that measures depth in multiple dimensions (we used an XBox 360 Kinect camera). A short-throw projector connected to the computer displays different video and images onto the sand based on how the surface of the sand is manipulated. This interactive 3-dimensional tool is used to study topography, landforms, watersheds, and how natural disasters and erosion can affect the land and its ecosystems.
Kai took this project on at the start of the school year after progress getting the sandbox software and XBox camera to communicate had stalled. He was able to quickly get these 2 important pieces to work together and we were soon off and running with designing and building the mobile AR sandbox. This first prototype was built at a height that would accommodate students as small as 1st graders. Once the structure was built, Kai mounted and configured the projector, camera, and computer, and added the sand. Since its completion, several teachers at all grade levels have stopped into the makerspace to see how it works and discuss how it could be integrated into their classroom lessons. Our next step in this process is to get it into those classrooms and to look at the coding that is used to make the interactive computer program work to see if we can manipulate it to create other programs using the sandbox (the movement of electrons, protons, and neutrons in a system and gravity simulators for example).
Nearly every 2nd block throughout the school year and often after school, Kai worked to make the AR sandbox a reality. This interactive tool is ready for students and teachers to use and for the future we already have students interested in developing new programs for it. I enjoyed working with and learning alongside Kai on this project and BFA is eternally grateful for the work he has done on this. We all look forward to seeing where his future plans take him as he pursues a computer science degree in college. It is also exciting to see how future students develop the software further so that teachers can implement the tool in dynamic and engaging ways in their classrooms.
Blog post by:
Sean Theoret
7-12 Technology Integrationist at BFA Fairfax