I keep waiting for someone with more spare time than myself to bring the memory palace idea to an augmented reality app.
I have a feeling medical students will pay a decent amount of money to walk around their apartment with an iPhone held out in front of them.
Also, the effectiveness of this idea implies that museums without a single artifact in their collection can be extremely educational by wisely creating a spatial environment.
A tour led through a "Garden of Presidents" or a walkable map could help students on field trips actually retain much more knowledge than in the classroom.
I actually pulled this up on last weeks startup weekend and we made some prototypes.
We tried it first with streetview, where you walk around and learn new words on a different language.
We have the best results when we combined it, with a special spelling where the letters were objects also. (like in elementary school, for example "A" is for Apple)
Like that you will remember the objects and not just some random characters.
The "let's go for a walk" and the "stay in this room" mobile versions are still in the pocket, so let me know what do you think about this.
I am sorry they are not online now. By pocket I mean ideas we haven't tried out yet.
I imagine the mobile app version to have 3 separete functionality, and we only covered 1,5
1. "I would rather sit" Is a streetview walkaround with predefined routes.
2. "I want to stay in this room" Is an AR version where you walk around in your room and place the words where you want.
3. "Let's go for a walk" Would give you new words when you stop somewhere in the city.
Of course there are other task and opportunities, like testing, spaced repetition, linkwords etc and unfortunately the team got separeted now (both in space and in thinking) so I am not sure if I would make this project hight priority...
I have a feeling medical students will pay a decent amount of money to walk around their apartment with an iPhone held out in front of them.
Also, the effectiveness of this idea implies that museums without a single artifact in their collection can be extremely educational by wisely creating a spatial environment.
A tour led through a "Garden of Presidents" or a walkable map could help students on field trips actually retain much more knowledge than in the classroom.