Two popular technologies that have emerged in recent years, Augmented Reality and QR Codes, have begun to make their way back up on the hype cycle and are finding useful applications in many industries.
When it comes to using eLearning applications, finding the appropriate context that makes instructional design and budget sense can be challenging. Creativity must drive any effort in implementing emerging technologies but pedagogy and money will guide it.
The Problem
Recently, I worked with a great team of graduate students at George Mason University to design a learning solution that utilized Augmented Reality as a learning tool. Following the AR trails blazed by well-funded institutions such as museums and since Virginia has such great historical resources; we decided to tackle the problem of learning history.
Working with interviews with teachers and students from local school systems, we established our audience. Imagine a classroom full of 7th graders, unmotivated, uninterested, and watching the clock. It’s not hard to relate when our only experience of history, our social and cultural legacy, is through a thick textbook.
Having been indoctrinated in Constructivism, we knew what goals we wanted to achieve:
• Generate student interest in learning about history
• Engage students’ inquiry, critical-thinking, and decision-making skills
• Make connections between the past and the present to demonstrate relevance
Since the Civil War is such a huge part of Virginia culture and resources are abundant, we decided take on a lesser known but not insignificant event, the Dahlgren Affair. The idea was to make the historical event and all of its uncertainties, drama, and significance come alive for the students.
We developed a instructional strategy to meet our simple goals based on situated learning where students can role-play the events in the actual setting of where they took place. Different missions would guide students through the historic streets and buildings of Richmond to relive history. But a lot has changed in the 150 years since the Civil War, and many of the cobblestone streets have become busy intersections and the historic buildings modernized. So now the problem becomes: how do we provide the authentic setting that a situated learning environment requires?
The Solution
One of the fascinating things about technology is that it creates even newer technologies, but sometimes it can be used to recreate the old, antiquated, and the extinct. To give us the authentic setting we needed, we settled on using Augmented Reality to help us recreate streetscapes, scenes, and visual clues students would need to complete the missions. To give us access to AR-based historical artifacts (digital renditions), critical information, and more visual clues, we decided to use QR codes.
Augmented Reality, depending on the application, can get quite expensive and hardware intensive. Fortunately, as AR finds its foothold as a consumer product, several free or low-cost services have emerged that allow you to create AR objects and content. Our plan as we move out of the design research and concept phase and into a workable prototype is to utilize services like Layar, Wikitude, as well as multi-media solutions like Adobe Air. A quick Google search will result in some really interesting things people are doing with free/low-cost AR tools.
Advancements in hardware have now made AR a practical tool to use on mobile phones such as Apple iPhones and Android-based devices. With the camera on a mobile device and the related app for this project, students can explore the city and see the overlaid images and multimedia content that recreate the authenticity of the intended learning environment. While panning a street with their mobile device, students will be able to see the old façade of an important building, a video of Confederate soldiers reveling on the sidewalks, or find the visual clues that lead them to their next destination.
QR codes are an effective way to establish the connections between the physical environment and instructional tools. In our case, QR codes would be placed in areas or on objects with significance to the student’s mission. For example, hidden behind the stairwell in the home of an undercover Union spy, might be a satchel of important artifacts that provide clues to what actually happened in the Dahlgren Affair. Since those artifacts don’t actually exist or are locked up in a display case, using a QR code to trigger a learning object or a digital rendition of that artifact allows students to be hands-on without leaving fingerprints.
Our strategy is to use QR codes to provide avenues to all types of instructional content and guidance. The flexibility of QR codes actually affords us some control over the learning process by providing access to content or research tools that we have generated or approved. Some QR codes will be used to tracking the progress of the students by asking them to scan it upon completion of certain task. Some unlucky QR codes, might lead students to a pop quiz pertaining to relevant information in the area around them. The flexibility and ease of use QR codes offer just makes sense for this type of application.
The placement of QR codes is extremely important to ensure that you are able to establish a clear and logical link to the physical object/location and the content it leads to. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to place a QR code that leads to information about something outside the student’s field of view. Local relevance to where the QR code is placed is critical.
Next Steps
Our initial design research and testing with a low-fidelity prototype was successful. Students were able to understand the activities and were interested in what the project had to offer. We received great feedback from students, parents, and teachers about what works, doesn’t work, and what they would like to see in the future.
Currently, we’ve made revisions to our initial concept and prototype and are looking forward to move to developing a functional prototype that can integrate GPS (location-based), Augmented Reality, and QR codes applications.
Faizan M.
