Abstract:

The way teachers have been educating our children is undoubtedly changing. Recently, several advanced classroom technologies emerged, for instance, interactive whiteboard, apprenticeship response systems, sound amplification, and computer systems. Furthermore, there is also a large number of institutions adopting the so-called active teaching-learning methodologies. Providing greater interactivity, improving teaching methodologies, and helping to motivate and engage students in a more active and dynamic learning process. Among the challenges and possibilities that arise from this reformulation in education, there are new educational applications for mobile devices or smartphones. However, the insertion of these resources in school is happening incrementally due to the little familiarization of teachers and schools board of directors, regarding their pedagogical use.

Augmented reality performs the integration of virtual objects into the real environment through computer vision techniques. This technology allows users to view virtual objects superimposed on the real scene. In educational area, augmented reality is able to provide an immersive environment for remote studies and classroom activities. With this technology, new educational materials can be proposed, providing interactive and more attractive content to students.

This paper presents an augmented reality mobile application developed to aid in the teaching of electrical circuits in the computer engineering degree. The application allows the visualization of 3D models of electrical components superimposed on the corresponding schematic representation. For the development were used the technologies Unity 3D and Vuforia.

Augmented reality-based applications use three components: the marker, the image acquisition device and the app. The marker consists of a symbol or pattern from which the virtual elements are projected. In this work, the markers for the 3D models, or virtual elements, were generated from the images of electrical components, using the Unity 3D and Cinema 4D software. The image of the real environment captured by the acquisition device, here the camera of the smartphone, is interpreted by the developed application, which identifies the marker and performs the insertion of the virtual elements. The image resulting from the integration is then viewed by the user, here the student.

To validate our proposed work a survey was carried out among students of the computer engineering program. The result shows that the application helps to teach and visualize the use of electrical components in a more attractively and interactively way when comparing to the traditional one.

Keywords:

Educational technology, augmented reality, mobile application, electrical components.