Novartis SchoolHub

Fascination with Humans & Medicine: Inspiring enthusiasm for AR and edutainment for Life Sciences

In the new visitor center on the Novartis Campus, the SchoolHub expands the offering for school classes with an interactive learning experience centered on medicine, natural sciences, and STEM professions. The goal is to communicate complex topics in an understandable, playful, and age-appropriate way while also sparking enthusiasm for Life Sciences.

During the approximately 40-minute experience, students discover six different organs of the human body. They learn how they function, which diseases can occur, and what possibilities medicine and research offer for diagnosis and treatment.

Through the targeted use of augmented reality, interactive tasks, gamification, and quizzes, abstract content becomes visible and immediately tangible. In this way, the Novartis SchoolHub combines digital technologies with knowledge transfer and creates a modern edutainment experience that inspires curiosity about medicine, research, and scientific career fields.

Exploratory Discovery Tour

Almost every day, school classes from all over Switzerland and neighboring countries visit the Novartis SchoolHub. Each child receives their own tablet and can discover the world of the body, medicine, and Life Sciences independently and at their own pace.

The experience is deliberately designed to be exploratory: students decide for themselves which organs and content they want to explore in greater depth and move freely between the different stations.

Thanks to an intelligent AR tracking system and specially manufactured, 3D-printed organ models on columns, up to 30 children can participate at the same time. This creates an individual, interactive learning experience even in large groups, one that combines technology, knowledge transfer, and independent discovery.

Experience organs in 3D, lifelike and up close

Thanks to augmented reality, the physical exhibits are digitally enhanced and brought to life in an impressive way. Heart, brain, lungs, skin, DNA, and eye appear three-dimensional, detailed, and in some cases larger than life directly in the room.

Students can move freely around the virtual organs, view them from different perspectives, and examine individual components step by step. Through interactive tasks and playful elements, their structure and function are conveyed in an understandable way.

In this way, the experience combines 3D visualization, augmented reality, and edutainment into an intuitive form of knowledge transfer, where complex medical content is not only explained but experienced directly.

Portrait images come to life with augmented reality

Young people share, as equals, insights into their training at Novartis, their personal paths, and how they found their way into Life Sciences. This creates authentic insights that build closeness and foster trust.

With augmented reality, eight classic portrait images are digitally enhanced and brought directly to life. When viewed with the tablet, the photos transform into moving images, making personal stories immediately tangible.

In this way, the experience combines storytelling, AR, and employer branding into an emotional form of career orientation that speaks directly to younger target groups in particular.

Effective learning through edutainment

Intelligent storytelling, interactive tasks, and gamification make even complex medical topics understandable and tangible. For example, an asthma attack can be simulated realistically and understood step by step.

Quiz questions, exploded views, spatial drag-&-drop interactions, and playful search tasks ensure that students actively engage with the content instead of merely absorbing it passively.

In this way, the Novartis SchoolHub combines edutainment, augmented reality, and interactive learning into a modern form of knowledge transfer that anchors complex content sustainably while sparking curiosity about medicine, research, and Life Sciences.