Experience shows that teachers can motivate students by giving them different experiences in places other than the classroom. The Minnesmark App complement teaching inside school with learning environments outdoors, by providing teachers the possibility to send out students on a treasure hunt to explore your prepared media in the outdoors environment to get different impressions and experiences that can trigger the learning process and the reflection in action. The students finds "treasures" in the form of media that will be sent to them over e-mail at the end of the treasure hunt, and work can then continue inside the school to establish and communicate learning.
The Minnesmark iPad App is an augmented reality browser that offers the opportunity to present information to the student in the situation and context in which he or she is. It can be used for different media events by adding text, pictures and sounds in the users field of view. It becomes possible to create a combination of two different perspectives - for example to add historical information on top of the phone cameras current image of the environment. Media can be triggered as the student approach a "station" and their iPad receives a signal via GPS that they are in the right area. For example, the sound of carts rolling over cobblestones can be heard if the students are approaching an old marketplace. When they direct the camera of the iPad towards a deployed visual marker they can see what the marketplace looked like 200 years ago. But this is just an example! We want to emphasize that it is up to the teacher and students what events are triggered in the iPad. An editor for creating augmented reality treasure hunts accessible via the Minnesmark App can be downloaded from this website.