STEM LEARNING BY MEANS OF MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY. EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF AUGMENTING CLASSROOM LEARNING WITH SITUATED SIMULATIONS AND PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES ON LOCATION

There is increased attention in education research to improve STEM learning by connecting classroom activities with field trips, for doing e.g. observations and data gathering in the local vicinity of the school. This may result in increased environmental awareness, STEM relevance and engagement with students. For educational and media research, advances in mobile computing, sensory input, and locative media create new opportunities for designing and studying situated learning that is contextualized both by location (e.g. at site close to the school), and mobile augmented reality (e.g. providing STEM related tasks and simulations).

The authors have designed and developed a 3D and visually rich situated simulation of climate change, which is shared online for a group of students, so they may inquire and discuss consequences of climate change on a specific location. The simulation and means of communication is implemented as a mobile augmented reality application running on a mobile device (smartphones and tablets) that takes advantage of sensory information about position, movement, and orientation.

Together with a STEM teacher we designed a pedagogical plan for using the app in the classroom and during a field trip to gather experience about new sets of constraints and potential capacities for connecting experiential and experimental learning to curricular goals.

We evaluated this approach with a full class of 9th grade school children, with the following aims:
a) to explore how students’ learning benefit from both off– and on–location activities, as well as exercises before and after excursion to the site in question;
b) to scrutinize the use of online communicative services (chat, comments, inclusion of links with verbal and pictorial documentation etc.) among participants employing the simulation on site; and
c) to position the experiences drawn from the experiment in the context of situated learning and discuss the explicable value of this and related pedagogical approaches.

The paper describes how the three–part exercise (off/before – on – off/after) was conducted with:
1) preparations in the classroom on the general topic of climate change and a presentation of the technological platform involved;
2) exploring the virtual, future environment on location (a dystopic version of the downtown Oslo Opera in the year 2222) including communication and documentation activities based on a series of assignments and traces/residual elements hinting at future climate change related events;
3) leading up to the student’s reconstruction of the possible history of the future from 2014 to 2222 by means of plenary presentation in the classroom supported by multimodal presentations.

We also provide video analysis of the on-site trial, supplemented with an individually answered questionnaire. In addition we consider examples from their documentation and communication activity on location and how these were reused and co-constructed in the group presentations.

Finally, we explain these activities in the context of situated learning approaches, and discuss how these theories may adjust to appropriately account for such learning activities and applications of mobile media.

The paper ends with a discussion of implications for curriculum design and suggestions for how such experiments may enrich our opportunities for advancing collaboration and problem solving that is situated and enriched with STEM representations and other resources.