“One of the things I love about our learning community is the way grade levels interact with each other,” says Mrs. Miller, the educational technology teacher. “While the buddy program formally matches younger students with older buddies, there are so many other ways students interact with one another. This project was great because the eighth graders were building the cubes specifically for Pre-K, Kindergarten, and the other Lower School students. There were times when they had to think about — and empathize with — how their little friends would use the cube and, therefore, had to think about how that would impact some of the design elements. I think that is one of the neat things about a PK-8 community.”

“When I first brought Merge Cubes and the idea of Augmented Reality (AR) to Powhatan, it initially was going to work really well with the older students in third grade and above,” says Mrs. Miller. “They have the ability to maneuver the Merge Cube and an iPad or other AR device at the same time. The Merge Cube allows students to hold the solar system or a labeled beating heart in their hand, or stand next to a life size statue from a famous museum. I ran into problems when I was thinking of ways to use it with Pre-K through second grade due to their smaller stature and having to manipulate all of these things at one time. I came across the idea of enlarging the Merge Cube and constructing our own giant cubes for Powhatan’s campus.”

“Mr. Funk (an Upper School math teacher) and I worked together to discuss how this project could work with his eighth grade Geometry class and cover the concepts of scale, proportion, and 3-dimensional shapes. The students were broken into three groups and given a Merge Cube to investigate and measure. They decided what size scale they wanted to use and how large to make their cube…”

READ MORE: http://powhatanschool.org/pulse/food-for-thought/merge-cubes-augmented-reality-ar/