Implementing AR in education

AR development provides limitless possibilities for any field it’s implemented for. It also promises a huge improvement in educational systems across the globe. In the last two to three years it revolutionized the learning process in all education levels.

Let’s find out how this field is being changed by Augmented Reality.

AR in education overview

Augmented Reality creates a more detailed and virtually immersive experience of the real world. So it is naturally suited to the educational process.

Being interactive, 3D information in response to the user’s inquiries, AR material reaches students regardless of personal learning style. It also helps to avoid the confusion of translating information from 2D formats into 3D reality.

Additionally, it provides simulation options to let students safely explore cases in which actual experimentation would be dangerous or impossible. The adaptable nature of this medium is as useful in a second-grade classroom as a medical school or an industrial training setting.

Read also: How to make the educational process enthralling? VR in education

New Jersey Institute of Technology created the following infographic to show the impact of AR in education:

Of course, AR technology is new enough. So researchers in the educational area are only starting to conduct official analyses of the specific benefits that this technology offers. Studying AR’s usefulness in education, experts have identified some specific functions through which AR adds to the educational experience:

Showing the benefits that AR has to offer, here are the most useful cases in which those benefits are being realized:

AR in Health-related fields

Understanding of how a human body looks and works from the inside is one of the most important things for health-related fields. You can use 2D pictures of the best quality, but they can’t convey the sensory experience of encountering the layered, 3D anatomical reality of the human body. Inert plastic 3D models or direct interaction with patients were the main ways to learn the human body before the possibility provided by AR educational application development.

AR in Nature Science

Lab experiments and demonstrations are undoubtedly one of the most effective practical options for bringing challenging concepts to reality. Due to budget limitations, available equipment or safety hazards, however, many schools limit the scope of practical demonstrations that students are exposed to. This is another fact that’s beginning to change through the adoption of AR technology.

The number of experiments and demonstrations students can witness is going to grow. In fact, such educational tools are already available.

Additionally, AR brings solutions for other science branches studying, like biology, geography.

AR in Math

The AR development helps to render objects that are hard to imagine and turn them into 3D models. This can make it easier to understand the abstract and difficult things. It can be a good point for visual learners and practically anyone to translate theoretical material into a real concept.
For example, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Portugal integrates these pros of AR into math lessons.

AR in History

Students can explore historical artifacts in a whole new and exciting way. For instance, we can mention AR worksheets.

School gym

AR 3D models maybe just a part of the lesson, like a teaser, or the support of the main topic with extra info from a different perspective. For example, a Canadian tech company CASE transformed the wall of the school gym into a ball game by adding an AR layer to it. When kids throw balls onto a wall, they need to hit floating shapes. And, this adds fun to physical exercises.

Our experience in the AR development for education

We had our own experience of cost-effective AR development. For example, we had a project of creating an AR application for students. Its purpose is to assist them in studying by harnessing the full power of Augmented Reality for more effective visual learning. Also, with this application students must have an opportunity to create interactive presentations and do storytelling.

The application was designed to help with different disciplines. So our main challenges were:

• Developing an AR application that works without ARKit and ARCore.
• Adding the ability for students to add their 3D models and do different configurations with them.
• Creating the opportunity to take photos and videos of created scenes and share with classmates, friends, teachers.

For AR educational application development of this project, we used Unity3D/C# and AR — Wikitude technologies.

AR application key features include:

• Creating lesson plans and challenges.
• Recording AR scenes to make future presentations.
• Importing users 3D models to the app.
• Sharing videos to social media.
• Using AR items: dancing AR characters, sculpting in AR, AR titles, etc.
• Visualizing scientific processes using Augmented Reality.

It also contained built-in lessons on how to use the AR application.

Conclusion

AR development implementation in education can have lots of pros. The positive impact that Augmented Reality experiences have on learners as compared to non-AR ones include:

• Increased content understanding.
• Learning spatial structure and function.
• Learning language associations.
• Long-term memory retention.
• Improved physical task performance.
• Improved collaboration.
• Increased student motivation.

AR applications also help to avoid:

• Attention tunneling.
• Usability difficulties.
• Ineffective classroom integration.
• Learner differences.

And there is no surprise that AR technology improves educational results.

It’s only a consequence of how the millennials generation gets used to absorbing the information. So the only way to increase the results in the study is to adapt to a new technology-based reality.

l.sidorenko