Google Comes to Town

There was a buzz in the air at New Century Middle School on Thursday, February 15th.  Some might think students were still jittery from a candy-heart sugar high.  While that may have had a little to do with it, the real show was in Mr. Clothier's Art classroom.  Dr. Susan Jinks, a Career and Technical Education teacher at New Century, signed up for a demonstration of the Google Expedition Pioneer Program.  Students were able to check out the latest in Augmented Reality using Asus Zenfone devices attached to selfie-sticks.

What is Augmented Reality?  If you have ever used a Snapchat filter to put Puppy ears on your profile picture, you have used Augmented Reality(AR).  AR uses live digital images layered over your view of the real world.  In the picture below, students were viewing the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) through the camera on the device.

The different tours visited today included Forces of Nature, The Solar System, Ancient Rome, Ecosystem of a Coral Reef, World War I, DNA and RNA.  Students were able to navigate all angles of objects that were super-imposed on their view of the classroom.  Some students even went as far as getting on the floor to see the underside of objects.  Below, two students tried to get a better view of the underside of an octopus from the Coral Reef Ecosystem tour.

The video below is from Google's YouTube page and shows what the kids today were able to experience.  Google Expeditions is a great way for teachers to bring the world into the classroom and expose students to things they may not have a chance to experience otherwise.  

The Google Expedition Pioneer app is still in Beta so it is not available in app stores.  A list of the available tours can be found here.

If you are interested in bringing this type of experience to your school, sign up here.

Tyler Callahan
@STEM_TC
jcallahan@ncmcs.org