See Animals come to life with Google 3D AR Animals | STEAM Activity for Kids

Note: This post contains affiliate links. You may read my disclosure here.

Hooray! We made it to another stay at home weekend! Do you change your routine on the weekend or keep it the same as weekdays? We’ve been having less structured weekends with movie nights on both Friday and Saturday nights! 🙂

Our at home STEAM Activity yesterday was letting my kids see the animals they’re learning about come to life next to them in 3D! Google has an amazing augmented reality (AR) tool that allows you to view animals in 3D in your own home! I’ll teach you how in this post.

MATERIALS:

• Smart phone or tablet (Android 7.0 or higher iPhone/iPad iOS 11.0 or higher)
• Optional: Animal Encyclopedia or something similar to learn about the animals you are viewing (or just read the articles that also appear in your google search about the animal)

PROCEDURE:

1. Google search for your animal of interest, such as “lion”

2. Scroll down until you see a section that says “Meet a life size lion up close.” Then click “View in 3D”

*Note: this feature isn’t available for all animals. Google search “Google 3D animals list” to see all the animals that are available to view with AR 3D.

3. View the animal life-size in your home. You can try to pet it or move it around your room. It’s fun to pose and take pictures then look at the pictures with your kids.

Tip: It worked best for us when my kids saw the animal on my phone in the space first, then they ran to the area where they saw the animal to take the pictures.

STEAM CONCEPTS LEARNED:

• Technology: I explained to my son that someone wrote a code that made it possible to see this animal in 3D on our phone. I told him if he learns to code this is something he can create someday.
• Science: I made a point of learning about all the animals we saw in 3D. We have an awesome book, The Encyclopedia of Animals that is my son’s favorite book. We can spend hours reading about animals in it, so we sat together and read about the animals we saw today. We also looked at the cards in my son’s card game, Top Trumps Predators. This game is a lot of fun and another great way to learn about animals. I recommend it for kids 5+.

If you are interested in The Encyclopedia of Animals or the Top Trumps Predators card game, below are my Amazon affiliate links for those items:

You can check out more pictures of our Google 3D Animal AR fun in my Instagram post here. Have you tried this feature from Google yet? It is really fascinating and my husband and I really enjoyed it (maybe more than the kids 😬)! I highly recommend trying it out!