EDU 642

I Believe AR and MR Will Change the World.

A while ago I found this interesting video that is a mockup of how our future COULD look with AR/MR ubiquitous in our surroundings. It was a dystopian, and cyberpunk look at how our world could be with a high degree of integration of AR/MR in our day-to-day lives. However there is a key piece that we are currently missing to allow something like this to happen: an affordable WEARABLE device to perceive and interact with the AR. Currently there aren't any, but I feel we're getting close.

As a "video guy" I'm always exploring fun video ideas, including how to use my skills in video production to produce April fools videos, which is exactly what I did last year on this very topic of AR/MR. I ended up creating and posting a video to twitter where I claimed a company had reached out to me to be a beta tester for a new "AR Lens", which was supposed to be a contact lens for AR. I figured since AR is already quite common with iPads and AR glasses are beginning to be "a thing" that people would believe the idea of an AR Lens going into production. And if you look through the comments, you'll actually see a large number of people fell for it.

In terms of AR in education, I completely agree that it can help immerse a student in the content, but moreover, I think it's incredibly important for students to start understanding this technology, as I think it will be all around us in the future, maybe not as much as in that dystopian future video I posted above, but I do feel it will revolutionise all industries as soon as an affordable device to receive the augmentation is created, and I don't consider our phones/ipads as part of this equation. People are already using AR elements in a variety of social media apps, such as filters in instagram, without even realising that they're using AR. Once the normal consumer can have an affordable wearable, I think everything will change.

The concept of Computational Thinking is sort of new to me, but it's interesting as I feel I approach problems in a similar way. I've never taught it though.

Coding is also interesting and something I don't have a lot of experience in as well, however, I want to be better at it. I've done some self led professional development (eg: going through some activities in Swift Playgrounds), but it's quite far out of my wheelhouse and, to be frank, since I'm so much more focussed on learning more about different types of media (hence my interest in AR), that usually trumps learning more about coding. I'm definitely always interested to learn more. I completely value it's importance in education though and have tried looking for ways to incorporate it into my classes. One way I've done this is with my students creating animations using Scratch, the free coding site. Here is a sample of some of my students' work animations.

Next year I will be starting a new digital media program and one thing that's been in the back of my mind has been having my students beginning to make video games. So this can definitely come in handy for that. The video on the REMC website, just reminded me about this. And the included activities that lead to the "Gold Quests" to create games seems like an amazing resource for this. Looking forward to diving into all of this.