Teaching aids have been around forever, because students learn better when they can hold and inspect physical objects. This is especially true for science and STEM concepts since they tend to be abstract and complex. We have seen over the last year, that teaching with video conference apps engagement is everything and keeping your students focused and ready to learn is sometimes challenging when everyone is staring at a screen.
The class skeleton, rock collections, and the annual frog dissection all play important roles in today’s k-12 tool kit. When you engage in something handheld and tactile during class, you create an accountability to the lesson and to understand the material you must immerse multiple senses into the activity.
We set out to create hands-on digital recreations of the most widely used traditional teaching aids giving students the ability to hold and study objects in their hands without having to pass physical models and items to other students. The rapid speed of content delivery of this new medium is where teachers can experience the advantage of mixed reality as a tool and explain complex scientific discoveries as new information presents itself. During COVID 19, as we all started learning more and more every day, the Merge Cube allowed teachers to hold a complex 3D representation in their hands by April 2020.
The same goes for virtual reality. The NASA Perseverance Rover landed on Mars on February 18th, 214.77 million miles away from Earth with today’s amazing technological advances, students where able to get a full 360 VR Experience, on Feb 21st.
All these technological achievements can foster equitable learning experiences through innovative approaches with mixed reality. Our focus is making experiences where students call hold anything and go anywhere. Empowering the world to hold and interact with digital 3D objects and travel anywhere virtually, enabling a fun and engaging new way to experience the universe around us. Setting a new standard, these digital teaching aids will alter the way millions of students learn in 150,000 U.S. schools as well as over a billion students worldwide.
“As the world continues to evolve at a rapid pace, there’s an ever-growing need for students to reach advanced technology fluency before they graduate from high school, so it’s important to put the right AR/VR tools into their hands today. This not only helps them get comfortable with modern technology for everyday life, but will also better prepare them for higher education and future careers.” — by Kevin Merges, Ed. D. (Real person — last name is pure coincidence.)
About Merge
Merge EDU engages students in science and STEM with 3D objects and simulations they can touch, hold and interact with.
Learn more www.MergeEdu.com.
