Augmented reality is used day after day in always more fields, from the industrial to the recreational ones. Today we talk about the first course for kindergarten and elementary school children that has been created in the world: the name is Learning Alive and it was created by Kaplan Early Learning, a company based in North Carolina that provides products and services that enhance children’s learning, in collaboration with Alive Studios, enterprise that has the mission to create offers helping children being engaged in math and reading learning.

Learning Alive is a suite made of three programs/courses, Letters alive®, Storybooks alive® and Math alive®, to learn math and reading in an interactive and fun way thanks to augmented reality.

“Augmented reality is similar to your typical 3-D experience, but it doesn’t require the use of special glasses or tools,” says Travis Williams, Elementary Merchandiser at Kaplan Early Learning Company. “While augmented reality is becoming more and more popular across several industries, this is the first product we’ve seen that utilizes this technology in early learning.”

The three courses have duration one year and help the children learning the different disciplines following the Common Core State Standards, the American learning standards; on the actual success of this method seems to be no doubts: a research made by Dr. Tamara Ogeltree, Associate Professor of Reading at the University of West Georgia, proved how the use of the Letters alive® program meant a substantial enhancement of learning in the children. “[…] Students in the full implementation of Letters alive® experienced greater gains in emergent literacy skill development than the students in the classroom using no parts of the Letters alive® curriculum,” concluded Ogletree.

As we are noticing in last times, the application of augmented reality to learning is always more popular and widespread: there’s no doubt that the school environment will be one of the ones taking more advantage from the development of this technology.