Augmented reality in education: opportunities and challenges

Let us see some data first.

In middle school in the U.S:

• 70 percent of middle school students use laptops for learning;
• 66 percent use desktops;
• 47 percent use smart phones;
• 25 percent use small tablets;
• 23 percent use larger tablets;
• 17 percent use basic e-book readers; and
• 12 percent still use netbooks.

In high school in the U.S:

• 75 percent of high school students use laptops for educational purposes;
• 65 percent use desktops;
• 60 percent use smart phones;
• 19 percent use full-size tablets;
• 17 percent use small tablets;
• 16 percent use basic e-book readers; and
• 10 percent use netbooks.

(Referred David Nagel, Report: Students Use Smart Phones and Tablets for School, Want More, 2013)

Some may call an “unsurprising” that more than 70% of middle school students use laptops and approximately 50% of the students own smartphones, so we might think about one question: why not schools and teachers begin to utilize these ubiquitous technology devices in the classroom? Would the use of these devices are going to detract students from the learning process or from contributing to future workplace skills?

Well, I say “almost yes”.

Now it’s time for students to obtain a new experience — augmented reality (AR)

What is augmented reality (AR)?

Wu et al (2013) summarized that as a bridge of virtual and real worlds, augmented reality creates a reality that is enhanced and augmented, through which allows learners to visualize complex spatial relationships and abstract concepts, experience phenomena that is not possible in the real world, interact with two- and three-dimensional synthetic objects in the mixed reality. It helps develop important practices and literacies that cannot be developed and enacted in other technology-enhanced learning environments.

Google Glass is probably the most famous AR cutting-edge devices, and one vivid example of the AR applications that is allowing you to get instant digital facts of your surroundings according to the use of GPS. As a technology readily available now, augmented reality holds great potential in education. Imagine how boring and abstruse a traditional geography lesson would be at school if the children could only be exposed to watch a text book or view some video of the lesson. However, with augmented reality technology like a 3D Solar System Model or Galileo talking directly to them, and they were able to interact with this augmented information. Teachers wouldn’t have a headache when teaching some phenomenon such as autorotation, revolution and retrograde motion. Children tend to learn better in the lesson if they see it from “a bigger picture”.

Augmented reality is a trend that is worth following as new apps and technologies are developed to make learning innovative, interesting and fun by scaffolding students’ curiosity to transfer complicated science learning to visually obtained design solutions. For example, AR allows students to add digital content to printed material, geographic locations and objects. Then using a smart device or tablet, they can scan an object and the digital content will appear immediately. The digital information can range from a link to a website, an invitation to make a phone call, a video, a 3D model or any other supported digital information.

Despite the fact that has been shown how AR systems can improve the learning in several education stages, there are still criticisms of AR. Will AR be widely used in education? Unlike Virtual Reality, which aims at replacing the perception of the world with an artificially created one, Augmented Reality has the goal of improving the user’s perception of the surrounding world, complementing reality, rather than completely replacing it. So, augmented reality has the potential to break into the education in following years, not as replacement but as helpful tool for teachers and students. I believe we should be embracing these opportunities.