“Making it real”: exploring the potential of augmented
reality for teaching primary school science
Lucinda Kerawalla, Rosemary Luckin, Simon Seljeflot, Adrian Woolard
Presented by: Aidos Askhatuly
Monday, November 12, 2012
COMP6008: Research Methods in Computing

Outline
● Introduction
● What is Augmented Reality?
● Using AR to teach about the earth, the sun, day and night in
a simulated classroom context
● Analysis and findings
● Discussion
● Summary
● Conclusion

Introduction
Augmented Reality has potential to engage and
motivate learners to explore material from variety of
different perspectives, and has been shown to be
particularly useful for teaching subject matter that
students could not be possibly experience first hand in
the real world (Shelton and Hedley 2002)

Augmented Reality is
● Overlapping real environment with digital data such as
sound, video, graphics.
● Interactive in real time
● Viewed in 3 dimension

Augmented Reality

Why use AR in formal Education?
● Inexpensive
● Portable
● Easy to set up(Web Camera, ARToolKit, 3d content)
● Exciting
● Visualise concepts which can not be presented in real
environment

Incorporating AR into primary school class
Year 5 children and their teachers invited to
participate in following classes using AR:
● Day and night
● Structure of the solar system
Analyses and feedback about AR was made by:
● Video record
● Teacher's interview
● Follow up questions about content

Empirical study

Pictures from the class
● View from the dark side of ● View as if standing on the
the earth, with girl in bed sun, with the girl awake

Analysis and findings
Positive:
● Children was not confused from technology
● One of the teachers said:
“AR can make traditionally inaccessible thing available”
Apprehensions of teachers:
● Stationary animation
● No control over the content
● Needed pause and stop
● Difficult to focus on doing several things

Summary
Authors wanted to evaluate AR contribution for teaching
primary school children. According to analyses and
teachers feedback incorporating AR into school
curriculum can bring many benefits for educational
sphere.

Conclusion
AR has huge potential to improve studying process in
primary schools. However, the weak point of AR is
flexibility that requires further consideration.

Q&A

Thanks for your kind attention