EligoVision's AR and VR project development builder is gaining popularity among elementary school students

EV Toolbox, an augmented and virtual reality-based project development tool created by EligoVision, a resident of the Skolkovo Innovation Center's IT Cluster, is gaining popularity among school students in Russian educational institutions, not only among high school students, but also among elementary school students.

First shift: from student to high school students

"During the development of EV Toolbox we focused on adult audience - teachers and students because we understood that in professional community there is a certain threshold for working with such innovative technologies. It was considered that in order to create AR and VR applications one must have skills in various programming languages and have experience in various software development environments and there was an opinion that "it's not easy and hardly school students will cope with this task well", - the company explained.

The first serious successful project that proved the opposite was a school hackathon on development of augmented reality projects in the EV Toolbox constructor, organized by the company's experts with the participation of the New Technology School project and teachers of the state educational institution School №17 in spring 2018. Schoolchildren of 8th-10th grades took part in the hackathon, who showed excellent results in developing an educational AR application for their classmates in just a day and a half of teamwork.

Since then, together with education partner New Technology School, EligoVision has already held 14 school hackathons and participated in three major educational competitions, where the entry age threshold for active participation in activities was marked as 7th grade.

The second shift: from 14 years old to 8 years old

In view of the great interest in AR and VR technologies in the field of education, a new promising competence - "VR and AR Development Technology" - was included in the list of Moscow KidSkills 2019 Children's Championships.

The goal of the championship is early career guidance for children of preschool and primary school age (6-9 years old). In preparation for the competition, they get acquainted with various professions: from eco-farmer to robotics, from chef to augmented and virtual reality developer, master teamwork and basics of project activities in real competition conditions.

"In spring 2019, EligoVision experts and teachers of the competence site - Moscow College of Business Technologies began active preparation for the competition, which was to be held in November. The task was to fully think through and develop the concept and competition documentation for the two competition modules: AR and VR. Then, training had to be organized for team mentors, and one remote and two face-to-face stages had to be held. The task was complicated by the fact that the time to complete the task was only 4 hours: during this time children had to develop two working prototype applications: an augmented reality project for target mobile devices and a virtual reality project for autonomous VR helmets. It was obvious that the task required an easy-to-learn, user-friendly, yet functional software solution that did not require the kids to know programming languages. For these reasons, EV Toolbox was selected as the main development tool for AR and VR projects in this competence," - explained the company.

The final stage of the championship took place in late November with participation of 20 teams from all over Moscow. Schoolchildren were working hard for two days: on the first day they were to develop an augmented reality application for tablets on the habitats of wild animals; on the second day they were to continue working on the same subject, but already using virtual reality technology to immediately test the created projects in VR helmets. As a result, the participants in the championship managed to surprise their experts and mentors with their results.

Working with EV Toolbox now

At the moment, the competition teams in the competence of "VR and AR development technology" in the championship KidSkills-2020 are actively preparing. In the new year, the competitive tasks will become even more complex and interesting, and there will be even more young developers who want to try their hand at creating such challenging AR and VR applications.

"A couple of years ago, EligoVision's experts and developers couldn't imagine that EV Toolbox, conceived as a framework for professional development of AR and VR applications, would end up in the hands of elementary school students and become not just a fun toy, but a real career guidance tool. A tool that allows introducing schoolchildren of all ages to digital AR and VR worlds not through a smartphone screen, but through creative implementation of their ideas," the company summed up.