AUGMENTED REALITY AS PEDAGOGIC INTERVENTION FOR ENHANCED SHAPES LEARNING FROM NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Learning shapes is the building block for children in understanding the world around. They recollect shapes in their mind for identifying, organizing and associating visual information with surroundings. This way, they understand, make connection and familiarize themselves to the new shapes in their environment, assisting their spatial cognition of movement and actions. The pedagogy of teaching shapes to children has so far been limited to traditional methods based on abstract shapes in geometry classes. The children who are good at learning shapes from these resources, tend to get bored eventually as they keep using the same toy or app again and again and repeat the process of learning such as fitting in different physical blocks and shapes of varying sizes or matching shapes in a digital application with shapes of objects in a digital picture. Can the newly evolving technologies be efficiently used to enhance the shapes learning experience of children and aid in enhancing their creativity? Augmented reality is an example of such a technology, which has recently unfolded unexplored possibilities. This paper analyses pedagogy of shape learning tools for kids at home and in Indian schools through semi structured interviews of stakeholders and further explores the intervention of augmented reality for enhanced learning experience through associating shapes with natural environment in a mobile application.