With Augmented Reality, Students Developing a ‘New Way to Learn’
Posted: April 4, 2011 at 1:04 am, Last Updated: April 1, 2011 at 10:30 am
By Jason
With Augmented Reality, Students Developing a ‘New Way to Learn’
Posted: April 4, 2011 at 1:04 am, Last Updated: April 1, 2011 at 10:30 am
By Jason Jacks
“Augmented Reality” sounds like a pilot for a Syfy channel television series. But while the technology behind what is known in scientific circles as AR is certainly state of the art, its potential as a valuable tool for educators is far from science fiction.
In Brenda Bannan’s graduate-level classes, EDIT 732 (Analysis and Design of Technology-Based Learning Environments) and EDIT 752 (Design and Implementation of Technology-Based Learning Environments), students are learning and developing new teaching aids that incorporate computer and smartphone technology to layer information over views of the real world. The concept is known as augmented reality.
“It’s a fascinating technology,” says Bannan, an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development’s Instructional Technology Program. “And it’s very new to education and training.”
It also gets the students out of the classroom and into the field, according to Bannan.
Last fall, one team of her students worked with a seventh-grade history class in Richmond to design a prototype for a smartphone application that would allow users to point their phone at an historical structure to prompt a tutorial.
Two other groups designed AR teaching aids for science students. One uses “digital markers” to allow geometry students to view 3-D geometric images on a computer monitor. The other, which was designed with homeschoolers in mind, employs cameras and markers to mimic chemical experiments on a computer.
Meanwhile, a fourth team designed an app that could be used by visitors to the Mount Vernon Estate. According to group member Jane Scharankov, a doctoral candidate studying educational and instructional technology, the idea arose when it was learned that classmate Debbie Baker, a fellow education doctoral stu