Augmented Reality: Building Resources and Student Independence in Physical Education

As I dive deeper into the world of augmented reality I am recognizing more opportunities for creating engaging activities in physical education as well as making targets that classroom teachers can use for physical activity within their class. I am continuing to use the program DAQRI, which allows you to create and share your own targets, to integrate augmented reality into physical education. As a review, a target is an item that is scanned to make visible an overlay which appears on top of the target object. DAQRI gives you the ability to create multiple overlays using the same target by utilizing the chapter function.You can place a separate overlay in each chapter and a button on the overlay allows users to move between chapters. 

This opens up a realm of possibilities for student learning. For example, a teacher could make a choose your own adventure story or, in our case as physical educators, a choose your own fitness adventure by placing multiple buttons on the same overlay. Although the fitness tasks would be different they all would lead to the same learning outcomes. This would allow students to be more independent and take a higher level of ownership of their own physical education. Another possibility is creating physical activity resources for classroom teachers. One of these resources could be brain breaks that classroom teachers would have readily available and could easily use within the classroom. I recently created a brain break target that lists each day of the week with buttons associated with each day. I plan to change these brain breaks monthly to give students a variety of physical activities they can do within the classroom or even at home. Below you’ll see a screen cast demonstrating how to make a target to bring up an overlay as well as how I created my brain break target. Download the DAQRI app here to scan the brain break target I have included in this blog.