Qualcomm and Big Bird’s Big Idea: Use Augmented Reality to Teach Reading
Good books have the ability to make words come to life, and two organizations are teaming up to help technology do the same through mobile apps.
At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Qualcomm, a chip manufacturer for mobile devices, and Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, announced a partnership that will result in a series of mobile learning applications.
The most talked about application has been, “Big Bird’s Words,” the first application to showcase the text-recognition capability of Qualcomm’s Vuforia augmented-reality platform.
During the much-discussed keynote at CES, Qualcomm brought out the big yellow guy himself to help explain how the application works.
The application, set for a summer 2013 release, will allow children to choose a word and then use the rear camera of a mobile device to find the word in their physical environment. If the camera picks up an incorrect word, Big Bird will ask the user to try again.
The video below shows the application in action.
Augmented reality is increasingly being embraced by school districts to provide new ways for students to interact with their environment. However, its potential for education has yet to be fully tapped.
What do you think of “Big Bird’s Words?” Is it an application you would like to try in your classroom?
