Discovery Education, the innovative edtech company that introduced the first digital service delivering educational content directly to classrooms twenty years ago, is opening a new chapter in its history by launching a cutting-edge iPad app that puts Augmented Reality (AR) at the fingertips of learners and educators worldwide.
AR technology has the potential to expand educators' ability to create immersive, interactive learning experiences that unlock students' natural curiosity. By superimposing virtual images and data on a user's view of the real world, AR supports visualization of complex topics, creates digital "hands-on" learning opportunities, and heightens student engagement with digital content, all while improving students' ability to retain knowledge longer by being a participant in the learning experience. To help educators leverage the power of AR wherever learning takes place, Discovery Education has made the Sandbox AR iPad app available now in the Apple App Store.
[Moving to The Next Generation of Higher-Education Technology]
Discovery Education's 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. 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. Sandbox AR 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.
Also New: DE Originals, A New Generation of Streaming Media
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.
The DE Originals content features many of the company's former educators presenting assorted topics to students in a fun and engaging fashion. Designed to ignite every student's spirit of inquiry, DE Originals spark a desire to solve real-world problems while offering all students a chance to be seen, heard, and valued by their peers.
The more than 100 new DE Originals now available to Discovery Education educators are headlined by the DEmystfied series. The first DE Originals series, DEmystfied, explains complex science concepts through fun, funny, short, digestible, and standards-aligned videos. Combining Discovery Education's signature storytelling style with creative graphics, DEmystfied helps students ask and answer questions about the world around them. Discovery Education users can access DEmystfied here.
