I don’t know Professor Khan.  Not personally, anyway.

But he’s had a profound affect on my kids lives.  Heck, I wish he’d been around when I was a kid.

So if you don’t know him, you should.

You see, he created a university of learning for kids online.  Not only that but he’s done it for free and raised millions of dollars so it can stay free and keep improving.  In fact, he’s attracted donors like Bill Gates.

Yeah, that guy.

You see, Khan’s idea was that classroom time should be about working on the struggle points with the teacher.  Using the teacher as a tutor rather than lecturing you like your dad after you spilled the milk.  Did you ever listen to your Dad’s lectures?  Yeah, I didn’t either.

Khan created these informative lectures about school topics so kids could watch them the night before class, stopping and rewinding when they needed to without fear of retribution (ever interrupt a teacher for a question in the middle of a lecture? Hmm…we’ll leave that one alone.)

Using Khan’s videos, kids can show up to class all ready to work and all at the same place.  So teachers aren’t “teaching to the worst student.”  He calls it flipping the classroom.

The other innovation of Khan’s is to use the things in gaming that addict us like badges and trophies.  These little things give kids constant positive feedback.  How many of us have stayed awake until 2am playing “one more game” of Angry Birds trying to make the next level.  Yeah, learning can be like that.

Flashback to my school years.  I got in trouble, a lot.  I mean A LOT.  School was boring for a hyper boy with too many thoughts in his head.  Khan could have saved me a lot of detention.

Thankfully, Khan Academy exists for my kids.  That’s why he’s the second most important person for my kids education.

Who’s the first?

My wife.

She gave up a career and a large portion of her sanity to be a home schooling mom.  When the school system failed our children, she took the reins and never looked back.  If you’d met our children, you’d know how good she is at her job (and it’s the most important job!)

But not every parent can afford to take off work to home school.  That’s where Khan comes in.  Games are a central part of how we learn.  It’s wired into our brains.  Using the “addictive” qualities of games can help kids learn.  Trust me, I know about “addictive qualities.”  I’m a gamer.  I write novels about gaming and how amazing technology changes our lives.

My kids are gamers, too.  Khan gamers.  Just the other day my son was doing math at8pm. 8pm!  He was excited about doing math problems and just couldn’t stop.

People say the education system is broken.  It is.  But systems are made of people and those people are us.  If we approach teaching our children like Khan and my wife, then it won’t be broken for long.

Robots battling it out for glory is nothing new.  Augmented reality robots racing around real streets and battling on rooftops is so 2010. 

The BBC show, Bamzooki, is an augmented reality TV game show in which autonomous creatures called Zooks are designed and then controlled by participants on the show by shouting instructions during the battles.  The game is run by:

The BBC’s Virtual Studiotechnology was used to enable realtime composition of the 3D rendered graphics with live camera feeds. Each studio camera has a dedicated render PC to render the virtual scene from that camera’s perspective. To know what a studio camera’s perspective is, each camera is fitted with a second ‘Free-D’ camera which points towards the ceiling. On the ceiling are reflective, circular bar codes. The 3-D camera data is fed to a computer system that identifies the targets on the ceiling and calculates that camera’s position and orientation, 50 times a second. Series 4 adopted vinten tracking peds instead of FREE-D as an alternative approach.

The contest runs in realtime on a networked PC. All the clients receive contest scene information and render their scene from their studio camera’s point of view. A bank of chromakey boxes then composite the virtual and the live feed together to provide a realtime composite. This video stream can be sent to the studio camera monitors so that camera operators can view the composite and hence follow the action in realtime.

The relaunch of the show began this November and the new season will run thirteen shows.  The Zook Toolkit comes with a simulator and a Motion Player to watch your Zook perform.  The Zooks can be run in an entirely VR environment, but the show uses AR to put the battles into the real world.  Some schools are using the Zook Toolkit to stage their own battles.

One of the most promising uses of augmented reality is in the field of education.  While some might think that using AR for education is just a gimmick designed to trick kids into learning, there is a scientific basis for why using visual information is important. 

Communication occurs through our senses.  We have five senses, but we don’t use them equally.  This is how we use them:

Visual – 75%

Hearing – 13%

Touch – 6%

Smell – 3%

Taste – 3%

As you see the sense we use the most, overwhelmingly so, is vision.  We get most of our information through the eyes. 

At Toyota, my employer, we put this into practice by requiring all papers to be condensed into one page.  We use lots of graphs, diagrams and as little words as possible.  We teach people to communicate through visualization, a prized skill in Toyota, because you can quickly convey a lot of information in a short time.  Even multi-million dollar projects are funded from one-page presentations given in less than five minutes.

This holds true for education.  So much is lost when a teacher stands at the board and lectures.   Little of the information gets through to the subjects, resulting in wasted time and uninterested students.  A recent post from Immersive Tech reminded me of the power of visualization.  While the video is from last November, it helps illustrate my words (yet again proving the point), so I’m reposting it.

I’m impressed by the interactivity of the molecular structure lessons, illustrating beautifully the complex nature of atoms with simple sweeps of the hand.  Seeing is believing and by seeing the lesson at a desk or on the projector, the students can stay engaged in the lessons. 

There’s a reason the phrase, “Do what I say and not what I do,”  exists.

We’re recognize the power of our actions outweighs the power of our words.

I had a few more iPhone AR apps I thought would be fun for my kids (and any other) and sneak in some learing at the same time. 

1) The Great Habitat Hunter – kids go outside to find either fauna, insects or birds (a different app for each one).  They take a picture of the target, and are presented with a list of possibilities.  They pick which one it is (maybe object recognition would be enough to tell), then are given a few facts about the target.  The target flower, or insect, or bird data could be uploaded to a database collecting all the information; and the kids could see aggregate data based on the information in fun charts and graphs.  For example, migration patterns of birds could be tracked. 

The kids would be given points for “hunting” the targets and bonus points for finding rare species.  In addition, the data could be used by scientists. 

2) Road Trip Buddy – Questions about the locations passed along the highway would keep the kids entertained and teach them geography lessons.  We often play this game with our kids on trips, but we usually run out of questions quickly. 

If you want to read the other ideas you can find them in this previous post.  And if you use an idea, don’t forget to give me credit and send me a free app.

When I first started this blog a month ago, I was apprehensive if there would be enough material to write about in regards to augmented reality.  I thought I might be able to squeeze out a post twice a week, if I worked at it.  Lately, its all I can do to not post everyday, mostly so the family doesn’t kill me.  Ori Inbar’s Games Alfresco site is a reason why I get so excited about AR and the possibilities it brings.  The information contained unleashed a thousand ideas.  98% of them have probably been considered, but I’m hoping to add my 2% to the general thoughts of AR study. 

My thoughts today revolve around the video Ori posted a few weeks ago:

Augmented Reality Today: WARM ’09 from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

So the voice-over is a bit strange, but once I got used to it, I enjoyed the message.  I’ll sum it up in one sentence — “We need to focus on learning applications for AR to move kids away from screens and desks to interactive experiences in the real world, augmented by technology.”

I’ll have to admit my orginal interest in AR was a bit more gaudy.  I’m an avid gamer, and science fiction fan, so the promise of AR was more about the shiny things one could do with it.  Ori brings me back to the value AR can add to society by increasing the learning rate of our children.  I’m all for it. 

Ori correctly points out that play is natural for learning.  My children will sit for long periods of time playing a “math game” that involves doing math problems to advance the game, but sit them down in front of a desk to fill out math sheets and they grow bored quickly.  Why is this?  I’m going to apply a bit of my Toyota Production Systems knowledge to the reasoning.

People do a good job with their work when they know how to perform well, they can see the results of their efforts, and they get immediate feedback on how they are doing.  This is part of a term called Jikotei Kanketsu.  The idea is we should set up jobs in a way that gives the employee immediate satisfaction in performing well.  This is basic behavior science as well.  So what does this have to do with the learning games?

Well, the games have rules, the players can find out if they are doing well immediately, and a score is kept.  Too often we wait long periods of time before giving students feedback (graded tests weeks later), so the student can’t correlate his hard work with the results.  Games do this well.  But the value AR adds that a “screen” cannot, as Ori puts it, is the AR gets the student off their butts and into the real world. 

So we need to come up with useful games that will sell a lot of apps on the iPhone, or other future handheld devices, that incorporate fun and learning to help grow the AR movement.  Off the top of my head, here are a few:

1) Math Monsters – kids walk around their house, and when they come to a door (should be identifiable without a marker), a math problem on a monster appears.  They have to get the answer right to kill the monster. 

2) The Number Collector – kids can collect numbers from any object using the iPhone camera (numbers are easy to identify).  The numbers are randomly mixed up to create a level appropriate math problem and when answered, they collect the location and object they scanned.  A Pokemon for math problems, and the locations people answer their questions can be tracked on a global scale. 

3) Tunester – Any snipit of music can be converted into a few notes.  The player would have to figure out the note and also the spacing between them using a sectioned bar.  This would help with music learning and also spatial analysis. 

4) Ratio game – Any object can be broken down digitally and the player must guess the various ratios associated (length versus heights).  Good for spatial analysis.

Here are just a few.  If you like them, feel free to use them, but just give me credit, and a free app.