Pupils in a year 6 class at Llantarnam Community Primary School invited their parents to the launch of an app that they developed.
The pupils worked with Value Added Education who showed them how augmented reality could be used in their classroom and gave them the confidence to create and build the app. The app includes games, stories, a blog and a gallery of a pupils’ artwork.
Teachers hope parents will use the app at home to support their children’s learning.
I attended the launch and heard how pupils have learned new skills in design, coding and creativity. Before the parents arrived the class told me what they had been doing. They said:
- “I’ll be able to teach other people how to code.”
- “We designed things in Minecraft and downloaded them to put into Adobe Spark.”
- “It was easy to learn.”
- “Augmented reality is like playing a game in real life. You can view things through an iPad.”
- “We put our drawings in a file and they appear on the wall like they are inside frames.”
- “We made a Guess Who game and a bowling game.”
- “I enjoyed drawing things in Keynote.”
- “Seeing our game on the app was the coolest.”
- “We learned so much.”
Parents were given the school’s wifi code and asked to download the app. Two pupils did a presentation talking about each feature in the app. They held an iPad up and it was live screening to a large display so everyone could see what they could see.
Once the presentation was over the parents could try out the app. The class was full of adults walking around waving phones and iPads as they were trying out the augmented reality features.
Gallery of photos from the app launch