Co-Design of Augmented Reality Book for Collaborative Learning Experience in Primary Education

Co-Design of Augmented Reality Book for Collaborative Learning Experience in Primary Education

Introduction

The AR technology has matured to the point where it can be applied to formal education. However, AR has not been fully adopted into academic settings, and the lack of awareness of AR’s wider benefits for education is one of the reasons. Compared to traditional technologies, AR creates an environment where the learners can interact and collaborate in groups. Using AR, it is possible to augment the text book so as to enrich the whole classroom learning experience by adding multimedia and three dimensional objects to the printed material.

Different considerations of the design process are required to meet the intended users’ needs, especially when these users are children. Therefore, co-design is considered for the practical part of this study as an efficient way to engage children in developing their AR Book.

Research Question

Can Augmented Books be designed for primary school students in order to support collaboration?

It has been clarified into two sub-questions:

·         How can co-design methods be applied in designing Augmented Book with and for primary school children?

·         What is the effect of the proposed Augmented Book on primary school students’ collaboration?

Related Work

Billinghurst, Kato, and Poupyrev pioneered the concept of AR Books by presenting the “Magic Book”. It was the first attempt at creating a transitional AR interface using a normal book as the main interface. Since the first commercial AR Book became available in 2000, a growing number of AR Books entered the market. An example of AR Book for children education is an interactive coloring book. Another one for an educational subject is Live Solar System (LSS) which was developed to help children learn Astronomy. Despite the few numbers of studies that focus on specific areas of education, AR Books should be developed for all kinds of subjects, and explored in different educational aspects in order to fully understand the potential of AR in education. The AR Book of this study will be designed based on an English schoolbook for foreign speakers.

An example of educational AR book is (miBook). It was tested on adults, not children. That study has not identified the target group for its AR Book. Although different studies argue that AR Book can enhance learning experience. Moreover,most researchers were focusing on the implementation and technological development of their proposed AR Books, rather than focusing on design consideration, or evaluating the effects on education.

AR applications are user-friendly, open-access, and can be used by teachers to create daily teaching activities. It can also be cost effective. In addition, AR Book values the traditional paper, and offers a medium that bridges the gap between the physical and the digital. A comparative study between a book supported with a CD and a book augmented with digital media found that the ergonomics in the AR Book provide a flexible interface which supports collaboration between children in educational settings. Despite the wide argument of AR supporting collaboration, there is a huge lack of studies evaluating this aspect on students in the classroom.

Looking at the development of this collaborative AR interfaces in the context of child education raises the need for co- designing with children. The methods of co-design are important to understand the children’s perspectives, and inform the design process based on their needs. Druin argued that involving children in the design of a technology that supports learning can impact the technologies that are created, and can offer a better understanding of how children learn, which can lead to new theories for education and new teaching practices with technology.

To design for kids, we must have a model of what kids are and what we would like them to become. Adults were once kids. Many are parents. Some are teachers. We tend to think that we know kids-who they are, what they are interested in,and what they like. However, we do not have as much access to our former selves as many would like to believe.Furthermore, it is worth noting that our fundamental notions of childhood are in fact culturally constructed and change overtime. In designing for kids, it is crucial to become aware of one’s own assumptions about the nature of childhood.Designers should be able to articulate their assumptions, and be ready to revise them based on empirical evidence.

Research Methods

Co-design,will be adapted to inform the process of designing the interactive AR book experience.

 To answer the first question, cooperative inquiry will be used to involve children,teachers, HCI experts, and educators as design partners in the design process. It is a suitable for use with children aged 7-11 when designing new technology for children.

For the second portion of the study, a questionnaire developed from Fun Toolkit, followed by a focus group interview will be carried out in the classroom to evaluate the collaborative learning experience. The questionnaire data will be analyzed quantitatively, and the following focus group data will be analyzed qualitatively for the purpose of triangulation. A description of each method is illustrated below.

A. Low-tech Prototyping

The research will start with low-tech prototyping which is a brainstorming technique. This co-design session will involve groups of children, educators, teachers and HCI experts. The session will produce models and low-tech prototypes, which represent the key concepts and directions for designing the AR book. The children participants (with an average age of 8-10) will be placed in three groups of three with one adult. Three adult participants (a teacher, HCI expert, and an educator) will join each group of children. Firstly, the idea and the aim of the AR book will be explained. Each group will be given a bag of art supplies, and asked to generate a model for the AR book. After that, each group will present their work and discuss it with the whole group, while the researcher will be taking notes of the key ideas of each prototype on a whiteboard. The models will then be given to a different group to build on and create another prototype, and present, with there searcher taking notes again. Finally the ideas will be discussed with the adult members.

B. Usability Evaluation with Affinity Diagramming

After the development of the AR Book based on the data collected from the previous method, usability evaluation will be conducted with sticky note critiquing, which is another cooperative inquiry technique. This formative evaluation session will involve the same previous groups but with new participants to ensure variation of data. A model will be given to each member to experiment with. The participants will be asked to write their likes, dislikes and any suggested design ideas on separate sticky notes. The researcher will collect the sticky notes and then use affinity diagramming to help guide the next iteration of design.

C. VAS Questionnaire

Final evaluation will take place in the primary school classroom to examine the AR Book’s effect on students’ collaboration. The questionnaire will be based on Fun Toolkit which is a visual analogue scale (VAS), suggested by child-computer interaction (CCI) studies to be useful for collecting opinions from children. The students will experience the AR Book in their classroom during the school day. After that, they will be asked to answer the questionnaire that covers aspect of collaborative experience.

D. Focus-group Discussion

Based on the scores of the questionnaire, students with the highest and the lowest scores will be selected for the focus groups. This conversation will allow students to express more about their experience, and easily give their opinions. It will be useful for gathering information-rich qualitative data in order to supplement the result from the previous questionnaire.

Using this set of proposed methods, the research study can provide a clear understanding of different aspects of the research questions. On the other hand, it raises possible challenges concerning the involvement of children in each stage of the research. Revealing these challenges will help design researchers to reflect on co-design methods and techniques for further adjustment to be used with children.