Education is one of the most important components of everybody’s life. We learn, we study, we discover.
The challenge with the current educational system is that it literally became unpractical in the real world. I believe since the invention of the internet, especially after it changed the way we consume information, the approach towards learning stuff has to be altered.
There are a few ways to do that obviously. My favorite one is to allow real companies to cooperate with universities and tell them which technologies to learn, which tasks to be ready to solve and which path to go towards. That makes sense actually but that’s not on their agenda I suppose.
The second approach is to take an advantage of modern technologies and use them in order to accelerate the speed of understanding how certain things work.
My gut tells me that augmented reality can be a perfect fit in this situation. It allows to take a 3D object and look at it from every angle. You can see how it moves, how it lives, how it changes in response to your actions.
Here’s some food for thought on why AR is awesome for educational purposes:
It is much more fun
According to numerous studies of neuroscience, our brain is wired to avoid paid and to gain pleasure. It will do everything to achieve its goal.
So by knowing in advance that learning is a challenging process, why not to make it a fun challenge?
AR can be extremely fun to use in your class (if you’re a teacher/student), in your house (if you love privacy), or outside (if you love learning with your friends).
If you’re into science, you can watch the structure of atom in your lab.
If you love math, you can watch the construction of a certain figure.
If you love traveling, you can discover new places without going there.
If you’re obsessed with animals, you can learn their behavior and carry them in your pocket.
If you’re an artist, you can let your imagination flow because in 3D it is even more extreme.
Easier to remember
Another great feature of AR is that it is visual, and because it is created in this way, the time that is spent on remembering, for instance languages, can be drastically reduced.
As you probably know the best way to learn new words in foreign language is to create associations. Guess what, with AR you can actually see this association which will help to recollect that info faster.
You can put some words with definitions on your wall and play with them when you have time.
Triggered-based actions
This is a rare one. You can actually put triggers in a form of AR images that will activate a set of activities that you can follow. For instance, you can learn different safety procedures, protocols in the lab and so forth.
Inspiration
As simple, as it sounds, AR can be a huge source of inspiration for your work and your study.
Whenever you’re bored or it seems like you are out of ideas, you can grab you phone or glasses (depends on when you’re reading this) and dive deep into another layer of this world, get recharged and come back with something new.
Anyways, I am a huge fan on AR. It will change a lot of industries and will go mainstream pretty fast. And yeah, I do believe it is the next gen tool to teach not only our kids, but adults also :)