Altamont teacher, students build Augmented Reality sandbox

When students are able to manipulate an idea in their head and make it a realty, Rob Dominguez says that’s a way learning can become an empowering and engaging experience — and teach that “nothing is perfect from inception.”

Rob Dominguez, Altamont’s director of education technology and seventh-grade geography teacher, recently worked with his seventh-grade students to build an Augmented Reality (AR) sandbox, a 3-D visualization tool that helps teach geography, geology and hydrology by shaping sand to create topography models.

The construction of the sandbox, which was aided by several upper school students and took about a month in total to complete, required students to go through several design phases until they successfully figured out how to construct the physical rig, Dominguez said. They then spent several weeks learning about the calibration procedure for the 3-D camera, writing some custom software and getting it up and running.

“There’s a lot of hard work that goes into completing a project like this successfully, and people really only see the end-product,” Dominguez said. 

After the sandbox was completed, they worked in groups to create one of three types of islands — all of which vary in their physiography and climate — via a thematic paper map that focuses on elevation. From there, they recreated their group’s idea in the sandbox.

They can then take that sand-model, create a 3-D model in the computer and export it to a 3-D printer, Dominguez said, where students can paint the different climate zones over the 3-D topographical island they’ve created. 

“It was an opportunity to show them what the real-world of software and hardware development is like: an interactive, collaborative process that is dependent on soft skills like communication and empathy to succeed,” Dominguez said. 

The typical cost of purchasing an AR sandbox runs between $6,000 and $8,000, Dominguez said, and he and his Altamont team built theirs for less than $300. They will be able to use it for future projects at Altamont.