One of the aims of the BEACONING platform is to bring contextualized learning experience to users. Those users will be both students and teachers and this type of experience will be valuable for both sides. For teachers, it will open a new way to engage students and create extraordinary lessons which will bring new quality to schools and present lesson content in a great way. For students, it will be something new and more interesting. It will let them get knowledge in an engaging and fun way not available till now.
BEACONING will be using different technologies to bring this type of experience to users one of this technologies are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons. What are beacons and how they work? To explain what are beacons we need to go back to 1994 when Ericsson company invented Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth was introduced as wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances designed with mobile devices in mind. First versions of Bluetooth were known for high energy consumption, Modern Bluetooth known as BLE (Bluetooth low energy) is energy efficient and won’t dry device battery as the old version did. This brings us to beacon, in 2013 Apple introduced iBeacon protocol which allows creating small Bluetooth – battery powered transmitters which communicate with your mobile device.
When you type “beacon” into Wikipedia it will tell you that beacon is “intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location”. That is what beacon will do with your mobile device if you will have the proper software installed – it will let it know when you arrive in the area where the beacon is – rest is up to software. This software will be BEACONING platform in our case. Beacons will allow creating location-based experiences and lessons. Hardware can be used at any location – both indoor and outdoor and work with different proximity levels. Some of the tasks might require user only to enter the room, some might ask for interaction with the object.
We strongly believe that bringing contextualized lessons is future of learning and beacons are one of the ways to do this. It is one of the technologies we will use to fulfill this goal, stay tuned as we will describe other technologies in future.