A sandbox to learn

Students built an augmented reality sandbox to help Redmond schools get their hands-on learning.

Last spring, Mike Nye, a technology instructor at Redmond High School went to an Integrated Tech Conference in Portland. There, he got the idea to have Redmond High School students build a sandbox so students can learn about landforms, water cycles, and erosion with their hands.

Kyler Outman and Isaac Hathaway, both juniors at Redmond High School, took the project head-on. Together, they completed the project over the summer. Building the sandbox was a learning curve for both students.

“We watched a video on how to build it,” Outman said. “We misinterpreted where the projector was so we had to move it to the other side.”

On top of where the projector would go, how the image looked was another issue for the students to figure out.

“Probably calibrating it, which we aren’t really finished with yet,” Hathaway said. “We can get it so it looks really, really good, and we’re at the point where it’s tolerable, but we’d still like to work on it.”

Altogether, Mike Nye is proud of how hard the students worked and believes this is only the beginning to this augmented sandbox. He believes students will work on new versions of it throughout the year.

“I knew our students in Redmond definitely had industry level skills, and I wanted to put them to the test,” Nye said. “They blew it out of the park. We’ll have it travel through schools. It will be in the classrooms. Teachers can start planning lessons and activities around it.”

Nye also said the ceiling is limitless for the tech department at Redmond High School after this project.

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