“We know educators and students love augmented reality,” explained one of the app’s developers, Phil Birchinall, Discovery Education’s senior director of immersive content. To help educators leverage the power of AR wherever learning takes place, Discovery Education has made the Sandbox AR iPad app available for free in the Apple App Store. Once a user has their Sandbox AR scene built to their satisfaction, they can take photos or record a video walkthrough with their own voiceover, to introduce their classmates or their teacher to what they created or what they learned, for example. The objects within the app each connect to information about its history (such as the Great Pyramid at Giza), its origins in the natural world (such as an African elephant), and so forth.

The app also has a mode allowing users to scale up and inhabit their own environments in a virtual setting, using their iPad to take photos of what’s around them that virtual world or scene can then be filled with the app’s built-in objects to create a scene mixing virtual and augmented reality, Discovery Education told THE Journal recently.

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