After reporting about more serious issues within the children’s world – a school bus being revamped with military camouflage to raise awareness about child soldiers, and Branding Magazine’s Good Campaign of the Week showing a darkly funny scenario of Toddler Killers – we take a trip down to memory lane, when children used to open their lemonade stands to engage to learn about early stages of entrepreneurship. Last Thursday Osmo introduced their new educational tool Pizza Co., an augmented-reality game that revolutionizes the way kids can learn about running a business, financial literacy and moreover how to keep their customers happy.
If you haven’t heard about the California-based company Osmo yet, you should know that their revolutionary game system has been adopted in over 15,000 schools in 42 countries around the world. It has been met with gusto by the teachers, because of the way how their students began to love experimenting, exploring, creating and collaborating with Osmo. The company was started in 2013 by two former Google employees, Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler, and has now 45 employees and 10 contractors. In the last five years, the company has shifted its focus in AR technology from adults to kids. And Pramod Sharma describes their main goal to be a “kids-first company”.
Osmo produces games and apps that merge touchscreen game-play on iPads with actual real-world objects and engages children in various physical, and interactive, activities in front of the screen. Previously, the company took on teaching kids how to code with Coding and successfully managed to spark creativity with a drawing tool, Masterpiece, and Monster which recreates child’s drawings into magical animated activities. Osmo’s first product was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2014. Pramod Sharma explained to TechCrunch‘s website that “I’ve gone through this journey of building a company, and entrepreneurs are all going through this journey, so our goal with this was: How do we give that experience to children as a game? How can we give them the life of an entrepreneur?”
In Pizza Co., kids own and operate their own pizzeria, using augmented reality pizza, toppings, and change to serve various digital characters. The game resents a fun way to understand what it takes to run a business, and moreover helps the children to practice skills like arithmetic and pattern recognition by assembling pizzas based on customer’s orders. The actual physical activity is captured with an attached reflective camera which uses the iPads camera and artificial intelligence software, to recognize what children ages 5 to 12 put in front of it. The game automatically adjusts to each child’s ability and can be played together with family members or friends, as can be seen in the promotional video.
Still, the augmented reality is not without its own advantages, as Sharma added for Digital Trends: “Without the iPad, it’s not as rich as an experience. Adding fantasy is the role of augmented reality, and we’re all about taking things that are classic and trying to add a new dimension. We’re trying to make things more exciting, more magical, and more approachable.” You can listen to what teachers have got to say about how Osmo is changing the foundations of education.
Pizza Co. sells for $39 on its own or with the Commerce Kit, which includes the Osmo game system Base and Mirror, Pizza Co. and other apps Newton and Masterpiece, for $59.
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