Children of the current era are the major consumers of technology. Right from a very tender age children spend most of their time glaring at led screens for various purposes starting from education to entertainment. Kids today are at the centre of this phenomenon and are often more susceptible to the overwhelming amount of entertaining digital content available online. Being at this stagnant consumer end reduces the creative aspect in kids.
Children by nature, are inquisitive, enthusiastic, action-oriented and innovative. If curbed in the right direction the ingenious young minds can work wonders. To lift them from the mere consumer end, children need to be encouraged to learn content creation from the ground level.
This doesn’t stop at handcraft projects. Today, kids can easily create their own digital content. With emerging new EdTech platforms, schools now have the tools to let kids create their own multimedia and even Virtual or Augmented Reality experiences.
For instance, TechXR’s XR Block Engine, an educative technology for digital content creation, lets kids create their own Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences in a hassle-free manner.
XR Block Engine is a block-based AR/VR game engine specially designed for kids from the age of 5-19. It is a coding-free platform where kids can create their own VR games with customised 3D content using drag-and-drop based code blocks, just like in Scratch. Kids are also provided with TechXR’s 6DoF controller, SenseXR for smooth interaction in the Virtual realm. With SenseXR, kids can interact in their own virtual world created by them. The XR Block Engine prepares children to thrive in the virtual community by teaching them how to become digital content creators.
Tools like this push students to think outside the box and can be very effective in helping develop students’ imagination and creativity in a fun and engaging way.
When children create their own content and share it with others, it gives them satisfaction, appreciation, confidence and inspiration to create more. The added fun of being able to view their creations in VR or AR creates huge levels of excitement and makes students feel like they are simply having fun while learning much-needed skills.
Talking of the grown-up kids there is a multitude of open-sourced tools and courses available to gear them up into creators. For instance, TechXR’s AR/VR app development certification course in collaboration with iHub IIT Roorkee provides the complete learning of AR/VR app development right from the scratch, promoting a student from a mere Metaverse consumer to super skilled metaverse creator, adding economical and intellectual value. For example, a student can create quality AR educational content with thousands of open-sourced 3D models available over the internet and create interactions for the models with SenseXR. Visualising 3D models, for instance, anatomy in humans makes it much easier for the students to learn and retain facts. Moreover creating the learning content on their own encourages and excites young learners to do better both ways, in academics and in content development as well.
What’s great about this course is that it improves the learning process and lets students connect with the study material. Many educators ask their students to create virtual spaces on specific subjects they have learned in class, letting kids demonstrate their learnings while getting creative and having fun. As they create, students also develop much-needed skills of the 21st Century. It helps grow their creativity, practice collaboration and teamwork, learn to code, create in 3D and use emerging technologies like AR.
It also allows you to introduce computational thinking in a very effective and fun way. Many teachers believe that it is essential to start teaching children notions of coding early on, as this is a skill that is likely to become a must-have in the future and that will, therefore, be needed by these kids when they embark on their respective professional careers.
While learning programming can seem very tedious and challenging for young kids, platforms like XR blocks have the potential of turning this into something interactive and enjoyable.
Conclusion:
All young brains have the potential to be curbed into ingenious creators but due to the lack of motivation, learning new skills and encouragement, kids get stagnated out to mere consumers. Parents and schools have to take the responsibility to hone the skill set in kids to turn them into innovators. If we lay the right kind of foundation in the basics of technology and create an atmosphere that fosters creativity we can hope for next-generation technology creators to emerge from our own country
