Dedan Kimathi University of Technology Students Invent a Virtual Reality App for CBC learners

At DeKUT we remain at the forefront to provide solutions and make life better. Dorothy Orina, a fifth-year student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, and Eric Mwenda, Computer Science finalist have invented an app to help digitize CBC, and make learning more interactive. The two have managed to develop an applicationdubbed ‘AR Edu’that helps learners study using virtual reality experience.

They were driven towards coming up with the innovation after they realized thatstudents in primary school failed their national exams because of low-quality teaching processes.“UNICEF identifies poor quality content and poor quality teaching processesas some of the most significant barriers to education in developing countries,” Orina stated. Adding that, “A more-educated workforce would make poverty eradication andeconomic growth easier to achieve and for something that important, it would only make sense if it were done right.”

The two advocate for gamification in the education sector to make it even more enjoyable and interesting for the young students who are exposed to video games during their free time away from school.

AR Edu presents the learners with an interactive learning platform where 3D models oflearning materials in their curriculum are projected in their environment through a smartphone or tablet. The learners are then able to zoom, rotate and bisect the models tohave different views. They can also enable labels to study the names of the different parts.

It has a virtual lab feature as well, which enables students to conduct lab experimentsand get the same results as they would in a physical lab. They can continue to performthe same experiment repetitively as opposed to a physical lab which would limit thefrequency owing to the inadequacy of resources.