Silly Dots!: Using colAR to Celebrate Dot Day

In preparation for Dot Day, our rocketeers read the story, The Dot, by Peter Reynolds as well as designed dots to symbolize what creativity means. As a culminating activity, we also thought it would be fun to bring our dots to life by using the free app, colAR. With this app, you can turn pre-loaded coloring pages into 3D! This technique is called Augmented Reality, because although we can see the three dimensional object with our device, it actually isn't there in real life! Another nifty feature of this app is that you can take pictures of your creation as you are viewing it in 3D. As we played around with making our dots larger and watching our own dot galaxies orbit each other, we took our activity a step further. Our result: Silly Dot Pictures! As you can see, we had to position ourselves next to our imaginary dots and pretend we were holding them, looking at them, even tried to take a bite out of them! Let's just say we definitely put our creativity to action today. Have a look at some of our snapshots below.

Instructions: To download the colAR app on an Android device, go to the Google Play store or click here. To download the app on an iPhone or iPad, visit the iTunes store by clicking here. Remember, you will need to download and color the sheets included on the app before you can turn your picture into 3D. Have fun!

Acknowledgements: We would like to give a special thanks to Ms. Shannon Miller at the Van Meter School in Iowa for sharing this very cool app on Twitter. To check out how her students used this app for #DotDay click here.