Bringing our dots to life with Augmented Reality in Cape Town

Mr Beal’s  grade 1-3 classes in Cape Town have had a lot of fun with the Quiver app as part of their Dot Day activities. It was the first time they had been exposed to Augmented Reality and it brought ‘Wows!’ of delight. You can find out more about using the Quiver app for Dot Day on this page on this blog.

The grade 1s used Quiver in conjunction with Paint 3D. They created colourful dots on our Windows 10 computers and watched the dots come alive when they looked at them through Quiver on a cell phone or iPad. It was their first introduction to Augmented Reality and I loved the shouts of excitement.

When using the selfie mode on the app, the ball became small. I was amused at the way some of the grade 1s tried to get the ball into their mouths!

In the grade 2 and 3 lesson we coloured in the downloaded Quiver Dot Day pages during our computer lesson. We then used the Quiver app to make the dots come alive. The grade 2s and 3s hadn’t used Quiver yet either and they were very excited about their dots changing into 3D balls.  We heard comments like:  “This is amazing!” “The ball keeps growing!” Ït’s bigger than my head!” “I wonder if this is a chocolate!” “This is such fun!”  “I have got to get this into my mouth! and more…”

 

 

    

We are wondering what our next steps are now that we have all these lovely Quiver pictures.
We could:

• Use them as a story prompt for a quick imaginative story about a dot that came alive
• Use them for a guided ‘dot poetry-writing’ activity.
• Use them as a mapping adventure showing the journey of the dot-ball as it leaves the classroom.
• Use them to create a story by selecting from a number of headings such as:
  “The princess’s magic ball”
  “A trip to China with a magic ball’
  “Travelling in a hot balloon”
  “The day my team won the soccer match”
  ‘Flying around with my magic ball”
  …along with any other headings that the class suggests

Could you think of any further ideas?