DEVELOPMENT OF 3D SOLID SHAPES IN AUGMENTED REALITY, AUGMO: A GAME-BASED LEARNING APPLICATION

Augmented Reality technology is proving itself as a very useful tool in our everyday lives. In the field of education, textbooks are used as the main tool for students to learn about new lessons. Even though some schools use tables and smart boards in their classrooms, but still they depend on textbooks for teaching. Implementing augmented reality in classrooms allows achieving amazing manageable and cheaper teaching tools. Teachers’ goal is to make their lessons exciting and enjoyable that students are enthusiastic about. Augmented reality for education transforms a repetitive and unexciting lesson into an exciting interactive lecture.

This study presents our Augmented Reality based educational application (AUGMO). The application inspires interaction and permits content flexibility, self-evaluation and has been successfully implemented for learning and development in classroom. Our study successfully helped elementary school students learn about 3D Solid Shapes by introducing them to AR technologies. AUGMO allowed students to interact with 3D Solid Shapes models and learn the similarities and differences while just using a tablet, a picture, and their hands. The results show that most of students think that AUGMO assisted them to visualize and understand more about solid shapes. Additionally, the data we collected from the study proved that there was a substantial increase in correct answers about solid shapes structures after using our AR application.

We found out that the previous work shows that Augmented Reality can turn classical classes into exciting new experiences. We decided to set AR to conduct experiment and developed an interactive application that takes the solid shapes out of a two-dimensional media like paper and presents it to students as a complete three-dimensional model placed in front of them, where they can move around the paper and fully visualize it from different dimensions to understand while looking at their digital representation.

In order to add fun way to engage students and reinforce ideas they have seen during class lectures, we developed two virtual buttons (similarities and differences) that allow students to touch to read the similarities or differences according the pressed button. Text appears between the two augmented reality 3D shapes. We consider this addition to be a unique feature from previous work done in this field, tackling similar problems inside elementary school education. By integrating augmented reality into the solid shapes lesson, we captured the attention of the students.

After reviewing the pre and post surveys, the data shows a major increase in the correct answers for the survey questions, proving that the students effectively understood these shapes using our AR application. Furthermore, most of the students considered that our AR application is helpful to visualize and learn more about solid shapes. More importantly, the post-survey shows a great interest in using alike AR applications in the future. We found out after survey that the teacher also highlighted the success and was satisfied with the performance and interest shown by the students.

Finally, we found out that utilizing augmented reality in the lessons taught to students supports them to see unknown interests and inspire their future accomplishments. We believe that the use of technology as smart devices and AR applications and others is truly developing the educational field.