The Age of Exploration

The Age of Exploration was, in short, when many European explorers discovered, conquered, and colonized other places. The main areas they travelled to were North America, South America, and Africa. These lands contained different resources that Europeans traded for, bought and sometimes just took for themselves. The age of exploration was the time period between the early 15th century to the late 17th century. In the age of exploration, many historically significant events took place. One of the most important of which was the Colombian Exchange.

This was the time of European exploration, colonization, and trade expansion, primarily driven by a desire for wealth, power, and spreading Christianity. During this era, European explorers “discovered” new places, “established” trade routes, colonies, and empires across the globe.

Causes of the Colombian Exchange

A big part of this project was learning about cause and consequence. Along that line of thinking, some of the causes of the age of exploration are as follows:

Gold

European nations sought new trade routes to Asia to access valuable spices, silks, and other luxury goods. This led to the unintentional “discovery” of the Americas.

Glory

Many European nations competed for dominance in trade and colonization, leading to a race to establish overseas empires. The desire to surpass rival powers like Spain, Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands fuelled exploration efforts. This lead the leaders of the time to offer political favour, power, and subsequently popularity, to the people who helped establish trade routes and colonies.

God

The Catholic Church played a significant role in promoting exploration and colonization, seeking to spread Christianity to new lands and attempting to convert indigenous populations. Missionaries accompanied explorers on their voyages, establishing missions and converting indigenous peoples.

Consequences of the Colombian Exchange

Global Exchange of Goods and Ideas

The Columbian Exchange led to the exchange of plants, animals, foods, and diseases around the world. This led to big changes in global ecosystems, diets, and societies.

Colonization

European powers established colonies in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and smaller islands around the world. This colonization had detrimental, and often devastating, effects on indigenous peoples, including displacement, exploitation, and cultural genocide.

Innovations, Inventions, and Technological Advancements

Exploration led to advancements in navigation, cartography, astronomy, and shipbuilding. These technological innovations had a big impact on people all around the globe.

Augmented Reality

For this project, the accumulation of our learning was that we had to create a video, using AR, to tell a story about a character coming to North America from Europe in the age of exploration.

So, what is AR?

Augmented reality is like adding a layer to the real world through your phone or glasses. Instead of just seeing what’s in front of you, you can also add images, text, or even animations on top of it. It’s like having a special pair of glasses that let you see things that aren’t really there, but seem like they are. Imagine holding up your tablet to see dinosaurs walking around your living room! Augmented reality allows you to combine the real and digital world, giving users a whole new way to learn, tell stories, and so much more!

How can it benefit society?

AR has a ton of potential to help people in all sorts of different fields. For instance, AR can help to teach medical students learn how to diagnose patients, or even preform surgery!  There are realistic surgical simulations in which students can practice procedures in a controlled virtual environment. They can interact with virtual organs and tissues, perform surgery, and then receive immediate feedback on their techniques. The main advantage of this is that they can learn without risking injury or death to any actual patients, which could help improve our health care system.

How can it help the public?

AR has tons of potential to help people in various ways. For instance, AR could help people see how furniture would look in their homes, helping them make informed decisions about size, style, and placement. In terms of education, AR could help advance active learning. (Which I am a massive fan of) AR could enhances traditional educational materials by overlapping digital content onto physical objects or textbooks. For example, students could use special textbooks to access additional information, animations, or simulations related to the topic they are studying. AR could even allow students to go on virtual field trips to historical sites, museums, or natural landmarks without leaving the classroom. This way, you could explore these locations in-depth through an AR experience. It could also help people who are unable to navigate obstacles such as stairs, by redirecting the user to where they need to get to.

Ar MAKR

The Way that we showed our learning with this project was through an app called AR MAKR. Ar MAKR is an app that lets you create your very own augmented reality scene.

The first step of creating an augmented reality scene is to create a story. Here is the first draft of my story:

The second step was to then draw all of the characters, scenes, and objects that will be used for the end product. Before you take a look, yes, the pixilation is intentional. Why I chose to pixilated all of my artwork for this project, I honestly don’t know. I guess I just like the way that it looks. With that aside, here are some examples:

The Compass

The Caravel

(a type of ship)

The exterior and interior of a crate

Early Trade

(Between the First Peoples of Canada and the European explorers)

The European Coastline

The Matchlock Gun

The French Colony

(That the gun ended up near by)

The next step was to turn these images into objects in Ar MAKR. This is actually pretty easy, and once I was done, I simply placed them where I wanted them to be.

The last step was to film the AR scene, and then narrate the video. After all of that, here is the final product!

https://youtu.be/9pMjZOR3ce8?si=wKccTnn5G7613gfj

The Driving Question

The driving question for this project was, “How can I use storytelling to show what sparked global trade and exploration?”

I answered this by successfully using AR MAKR to create a story showing the causes and consequences of the Age of Exploration.

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for reading my blog post! Please feel free to check out the rest of my learning portfolio! I hope you learned a thing or two about history, the Colombian Exchange, and AR!