Quick thinking: augmented reality in schools

Recently my friend wrote to be and asked about augmented reality. I want to share with you some short, quick thoughts about augmented reality in schools.

“I’m looking for some cool usage of AR for kids about 12-years old. I’ve checked different projects on the internet but all of them seems like dreams. Am I looking wrong?” This simple question made me thinking about this problem, because this is a very big problem of augmented reality. He didn’t find anything because we are not using AR in our schools. Let us be honest, today`s children are much different than kids from 80`s and 90`s. They were/are growing up with smartphones and tablets in their hands and it looks like our schools are forgetting about that.

Why we are not using this fantastic technology to help our kids ? Don’t get me wrong, I love books, I really thing that we need to teach our kids to read them and to love them, they should never be forgotten but there are a lot of things that can be improved by augmented reality in terms of teaching. We can use the technology to show richer content, to provide better ways for understanding complicated issues.

I’m sure that augmented reality will arrive to schools sooner or later. I’m also sure that it will be rather later and I can’t understand that. There are no technological barriers. Spend just 5 minutes with google and you will find multiple projects of “augmented books” or “augmented sandboxes” and many more. But no body want to invest into that, no body want to provide it to wider audience. Why ? Because we are afraid ? Because we do not know how to use it ? Because it is an experiment ? Even if we will answer on all those questions “yes”, we need to try, we need to search. We need to remember that even the longest trip always begins from one small step.