Every year, I enjoy celebrating International Dot Day, and it seems that every year we discover new ways to celebrate.  This year, I was excited to discover colAR Mix 3D coloring book.  I discovered the app while reading Fablevision’s posts about Dot Day.  colAR Mix is an augmented reality app that takes 2D coloring pages and brings them to life.  You can see the amazing video here:

For Dot Day, they made a special free page that allows students to design their own dots and turn them into rotating discs, falling balls, rotating solar systems, and revolving globes.  The app has a built in camera so you can take pictures of your creation, pretend that you are holding your creation in your hand, or even work with a partner to take your picture with your creation.

The students have been blown away by the coolness of this app.  Every adult that has seen it has immediately downloaded it on their phones and iPads to try it out for themselves.  Other than the coolness, I could really see this being used for multiple purposes.  When you study maps, you often have to think about something that is 3D in a flat format.  This app allows students to design something flat and see what it looks like in 3D.  Perhaps by working through this several times students would gain some understanding about how our flat maps of the world actually translate into the actual 3D world we live in.  It would be interesting to connect this with the upcoming explorers study that I am doing with 4th grade.  I would love to hear others’ ideas of how it might be used beyond dot day.