Teach Tiles
Impact: Designing for Future Educational Technologies#
Key Concepts: Augmented Reality, Educational Technology
Tools: Unity, Vuforia Mixed Reality API
Roles: User Experience Designer, Graphic Designer, Videographer, Video Editor
Duration: 24 hours during HackCMU 2016
Team Members: Tom Wildenhain and Benjamin Johnson-Staub
TeachTiles is both a really interesting design concept and an excellent example of how low- and mid-fidelity prototypes can be developed quickly, while still yielding meaningful engagement and feedback from people.
Its initial design concept came from an exploration of the Vuforia mixed reality API as it could be used in Unity, a 3-D game engine and development environment. Unique, QR-like codes could be printed around symbols or characters, and picked up by an app (or game) as 3-D objects and manipulated, compared, or checked by the computer.
Writing this out sounds silly in retrospect, but this certainly had the “wow” factor in 2016 when we first showed it to some of the other students in the hackathon… and, as it turns out, the judges. Our team won HackCMU 2016, my first hackathon, and came away with a deep respect for how quick prototypes can represent the promise of novel ideas.