Education innovator Futurelab today launched a free resource for schools that combines hands-on activity with state-of-the-art mobile technology to support learning that is both engaging and stimulating. Create-A-Scape enables young people aged 10 and upwards to learn while exploring their surroundings, using PDA handheld computers.

The Create-A-Scape website (www.createascape.org.uk) provides a set of resources to enable teachers and pupils to create digitally-enhanced, personalised learning experiences known as mediascapes. A collection of location-sensitive sounds and images that are ‘attached to’ the local landscape, these are created using the mediascape authoring toolkit, a pervasive media software developed at HP Laboratories in Bristol. It is rather like overlaying a digital canvas onto the every day world. They can then be experienced in the outside world using mobile technology. Users can create a range of experiences from tours of discovery to art installations – the only constraint is imagination.

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