Discovery Education, an edtech company, has launched a freeiPad app designed to put “Augmented Reality (AR) at the fingertips of learners and educators worldwide.”
The Sandbox AR app empowers students and teachers to create, share, and even inhabit virtual environments. Within Sandbox AR, users can create virtual worlds and populate them with some of the hundreds of unique objects from history, the built world, science and nature, and more.
The folks at Discover Education saysthat Sandbox AR also gives students new ways to express themselves and demonstrate their learning through a feature that lets learners take photos or record a video walkthrough with their own voice over. The app even offers a mode that allows users to scale up and inhabit their own life size virtual environments.
For those new to AR, Sandbox AR includes many pre-built sandboxes exploring diverse subjects such as ancient Egypt, space exploration, Mayan civilization, road construction, and more, with additional sandboxes coming soon. Discovery Education is also making available several free, pre-built lessons educators can use with the app to familiarize themselves with integrating AR into classroom instruction. Sandbox AR is available for download here.
In addition to announcing the availability of the Sandbox AR app, Discovery Education is today introducing DE Originals. Produced by Discovery Education’s expert curriculum team, DE Originals represent a new generation of streaming media and is exclusively available to subscribers of Discovery Education’s K-12 learning platform.