Augmented Playground Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Augmented Playground Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal)

Project Summary

Augmented Playground Europe
The creation of Augmented Realities for classroom activities

Europe is the place where most of our students will live their future lives. Their future is closely connected to the prosperity of the European Union. On the other hand Europe relies on well qualified and active citizens who are ready to work in the 21st century. Our project aimed at the students’ competences to succeed in being an active and qualified citizens in the 21st century.
The project fostered not only the openness for new technologies but also the willingness for a lifelong learning as the students realized how many possibilities there are to create new augmented environments.

The fact that students are enabled to work with augmented realities stands alone and will be motivation enough to participate actively in this project. Furthermore it arouses curiosity to get to know other school systems, learning environments, cultures and languages.
In our project we created augmented realities to use in classrooms. We started off the project activities with a simple augmented book, which can be used in any subject at school.In this first meeting the students created tutorials in Germany that showed the huge amount of possibilities this new medium can have in the classroom by augmenting school books of different subjects.
In Stockholm the students had the task to set up their own augmented sightseeing tour. We developed a new way of exploring cities with self selected markers to be recognized by our tablets/smartphones so they were able to teach self-created lessons about the students’ own environment in order to learn more about their city/town. This was further explored by visiting the Philips museum in Eindhoven and achieving art in a new way using markers which brought the technical displays to “life“ with the use of an augmented reality. We first had a professionally created guided augmented tour through the museum by the staff in order to show the students what is possible. Later they took their own pictures and were able to bring their own interests to life. Since the web applications we decided to use, HP Reveal and BlippAR, either suddenly stopped their service or just set their website on maintenance when the students wanted to present their results, it also increased their problem solving capacity because they had to adjust their results to there applications immediately.
In Spain the students first developed a library in Floor Planner which was later augmented with the web application Augment.
In a last step augmented reality helped us to overcome language barriers as the tablets and smartphones recognized objects and provided the information in different languages.

All the information can easily be changed, as the programming of the markers are created individually for the AR events. Through simple changes in the programming there will be the adaptability for other teachers/students to use it.

For us, a group of five schools from Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Germany, the project was a possibility to introduce a new methodology to the teaching/learning process and to prove a new technology for its usage in the classroom.
The international context enhanced the diversity of ideas and offered the opportunity to invent augmented realities to use in almost any classroom in any subject.

Each year about 100 students formed the main project team. They started their work locally and first of all learned how to program first augmented realities. Not only the ones that travel benefit from the exchange but also the hosting families benefit from these experiences a lot as they got a deep insight into another culture’s life, especially for the six long term study mobilities of students from Sweden, Spain and Germany. Besides this, many teachers in each school have ben encouraged to use augmented realities with other groups of students which led to a progress of this technology.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 118084,66 Eur

Project Coordinator

Hermann-Runge-Gesamtschule & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Secció d’Institut CARDENER
• ISTITUTO DI ISTRUZIONE SUPERIORE GALILEO GALILEI
• Rålambshovsskolan
• Frits Philips, lyceum-mavo