21st century skills AR in education learning innovation space Lake Forest Country Day School museum

Building a virtual museum with 3DBear

Jussi Kajala

VR and AR pose a very real challenge.

On one hand, the engagement they provide is astounding. Even among adults, there’s a collective “WHOA” when people personally experience these technologies for the first time. It’s a truly transformative tool that can not be replicated. Yet so many of these experiences are consumptive. Our kids can essentially watch a movie, but it doesn’t actually cause them to think.

3DBear is the tool that bridges the gap between technological wonder and utility.

At Lake Forest Country Day School, we build a significant portion of our curriculum around Innovation and Design Thinking. We posed a challenge to our 1st-grade students: design an augmented reality museum that symbolizes the experience of attending our school.

Our first graders chose dozens of school life aspects that they felt painted a complete picture of the LFCDS experience. These included homecoming, our Innovation Space, content areas, social-emotional learning and, of course, recess. Each student chose one of these areas to become their area of focus for the museum. The content area goals were using symbols, Design Thinking, and geometric shapes. What made this museum unique, however, was that it was created entirely in augmented reality in 3DBear.

Our students’ goal was to create a museum that would exist virtually in a physical space. We had our students design their concept images in Tinkercad (their ideations were drawn). We had shown them the website prior to ideation so they knew some of the limitations in terms of shape options and colors.

3DBear was the software that truly made this project work. We were able to download each student’s project as an OBJ file. From there, they were able to upload the OBJ into 3DBear. This meant that the CAD Files that students created were able to be resized and placed around the room. Students were able to create physical nameplates with the title of their piece and place their CAD file directly behind it.

Students felt empowered by representing their knowledge of our community and values from their own perspective. They were so proud of their final projects

This year, we’re hoping to blend more traditional building methods while incorporating CAD designs in 3DBear.

Barnewell_Glenda 2019