Augmented Reality Apps for Education Wes Warner

Genesis Christian College, Bray Park, Queensland, 4500

AbstractWireless mobile devices such as the iPhone and Google Android phones are increasingly using GPS technology and their applications offer education a great deal of promise. Initially, Augmented Reality required unwieldy headsets and kept users largely tethered to their desktop computers (2010 Horizon Report. The camera, electronic compass and GPS units that are embedded in these phones now serve as the means to combine real world data with virtual data; Augmented Reality applications can pinpoint where the mobile’s camera is pointing and overlay relevant information at appropriate points on the screen.

Currently, many augmented reality efforts are focused on entertainment, social networking and marketing, but according to the the 2010 Horizon Report, these will spill into other areas as the technology matures and becomes even more simplified.

Sekai Camera is a mobile Augmented Reality application for the iPhone and Google Android devices. It allows the users of these devices to GeoTag:

A photo and tag it with text

An audio recording and tag it with text

A transcript or

Combine all three together in one AirTag

IntroductionThe concept of blending (augmenting) virtual data — information, rich media, and even live action — with what we see in the real world, for the purpose of enhancing the experience and information we can perceive with our senses is a powerful one. I believe that no other technology has had the potential to radically revolutionize education. Augmented Reality will transform education from a text based system to a safe, practical application of the theory students learn by giving students access to more information in a more interactive way and helping them find different events and places of interest more easily (Speller 2009)

The ability to see in real life what they have read about in class is a great learning tool. Sekai Camera brings about this experience but with the added opportunity for students to collaborate and comment on what their peers and teacher have said.

When a decision to include an excursion as part of the curriculum is made, it is good professional practice to go to the site and identify the learning experiences that the students will need to see to make the excursion worthwhile and educational. In addition to this, the teacher would also do a risk assessment of the area.

With Sekai Camera, the teacher will be able to take photos, write up points of interest and record audio for the students

to ‘see’ when they do their recon of the proposed site. When the students arrive at their destination, they will be able to view their teachers Air Tags and comment on the Air Tags they ‘see’.

The Learning CurveI have been interested in Augmented Reality in education for a while however these applications were difficult to use and embed into everyday teaching as they used commercial software which has a steep learning curve, which is not conducive for a mass uptake of the software . Technology should enhance the teaching process, not dictate it (Sigafoos, J 2007:3). With the introduction of smart phones and the vast array of intuitive applications in the App Store, technology is not longer a hindrance or dictator of the teaching process.

I regularly trawl through the App Store to find interesting applications that could be used for education. I tend to stay away from the Education category and focus on Productivity, Navigation, Utilities, and Social Networking as I see affordances in many of these applications for education that the developers have yet to see.

The first time opening up the application Sekai Camera on my iPhone, I saw the following screen:

Before I could use the application I had to register with the company who developed the software. This is one drawback with living in a digital age - every company wants your data. As I was learning this application in the view of using it with my students and to showcase it to my colleagues, I had decided to use my official title, Mr_Warner.

As you can see from the figure to the right, the data you need to supply for your profile (which Sekai Camera call your Air Profile) is an email address and username. I did experiment with using a different email address. I was hoping that if I entered my Posterous or Evernote email address that every time I created an AirTag, this AirTag would be sent to either my Posterous or Evernote account. Unfortunately this is not the case. I have emailed the

developers this suggestion as I think this would be a great benefit to have as it would tie in my other online activities.

Once you have registered your details, you are then provided with the LiveView. LiveView displays all of the AirTags posted in your location. Depending on your location, the LiveView screen can be a bit busy, however this is where the Filter will help.

AirTags (Photos, notes, or Audio) look like a floating picture f r a m e o n y o u r s c re e n . AirTags will also appear to move as you roam along. As the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 have a built-in compass, the position of the tags change w h e n y o u c h a n g e t h e direction of the device. At the top of the screen they h a v e W N E S w h i c h

represent the compass rose. As Air Tags are posted, dots indicating where they are appear on the compass. It does take some getting used to, especially when you have created a lot of AirTags, or that the application is quite popular where you are.

A s I b e c a m e m o r e accustomed to using Sekai Camera, I noticed several buttons on the bottom beside the Post icon. These buttons/icons were Filter, Pocket, Game, and Life.

Filter, I found out through experimentation, is exactly what is says - it filters the air tags around you. This would be great in any education situation where you would want to limit the students to see certain AirTags. The Filter will allow the teacher to show AirTags by:

Their age - 1Day to 1 Month old AirTags

Their distance - 50 metres to 300 metres from where they were created.

In addition to this I found out via the website that you can follow others and when you select the List icon in the Filter menu, Sekai Camera will only show the AirTags by those you follow. This option I feel would be a great selling point to educators who may worry over privacy issues or students seeing unwanted AirTags.

The icon, Pocket, I found out allowed me to ‘collect’ AirTags and save them. This I see as invaluable if I was to be using this with my students on an excursion as evidence the students visited all the areas of interest.

The Game icon perplexed me. The website supplies the following information on the game Ka-Boom.

Ka-boom! is a social and a multi-player game. You can blow up your friends or the entire world! When you run into a bomb belonging to another player, you can either try to defuse it or try to escape. Defusing a bomb might be a challenge, but only real cowards would run away.

I had attempted to play the games, Ka-boom, and Sekai Hero without success. I think this could be put down to either my age and/or the cultural difference between Japan and Australia.

Another button on the bottom on the screen was Life. Life was a button I could see myself using quite a bit. Life

allowed you to see a timeline of all your AirTags, reply to other AirTags, and follow other users (a bit like twitter)

ResultsLearning a new technology in a non structured manner is what I have always done. I have not attended any workshops to learn traditional or Web 2.0 software. Instead I rely on my Personal Learning Network (email list-serves, twitter and teaching colleagues) and my students, who I admire so much for their humble attitude when they show me something I did not know. According to Stanton and Stammers, there is no significant difference in the training time between the two conditions (structured and unstructured training). However, the difference between the transfer and retention performance between the two approaches s ignificance with better operational performance in the unstructured condition.

Learning in this manner is not for everyone and in many cases I have often reflected through my journal and my AudioBoo entries on how I could have done things better, more efficient. This reflection is used when I want or need to teach a new skill to my students or when they teach me something new. Holmes, Byrne and Garner (2006, p. 99) believe that as learners we need to continually self-assess and reflect as these cognitive processes are crucial in order for the learner to be able to guide themselves in determining “where they are” in their learning and what the next steps should be. Learning Sekai Camera was not difficult which is probably why you cannot find any tutorials except for their website.

I have focused on excursions as to where you would use this application, however there are many more areas in which it could be used. These include:

History - Archaeological digs could be set up and recorded using Sekai Camera with GeoTagged photos, interviews and notes of the event which can be referred to in a report the students would write up at a later stage.

Health and Physical Education - Recording Sports Day with Sekai Camera would be great cross referencing with previous sports day. Records and competitors would be able to have AirTags created on the day. The next time the sports day is run, these tags would be visible.

Geography - Urban Planning is a major topic for the Senior Geography syllabus. I can imagine that using this application on the same area over time will show students exactly how the u r b a n l a n d s c a p e h a s changed over the years. It is possible to collect older p h o t o g r a p h s f r o m textbooks and AirTag them in the correct geographic area as well.

Ag ri cu l tura l Sc ience - Growing Crops, and Animal Husbandry would allow the students to keep an Augmented Reality journal of what has happened with their crops and/or animals throughout the season.

English/Drama - Capturing AirTags throughout a performance to review at a latter stage.

In fact there are so many ways to integrate this application into the curriculum. What does remain is how I would teach this application to my students. With the rather limited resources available, I would provide the class with the opportunity to use their smart phone to find some AirTags that I have created. The very first AirTag would be found in the classroom and it would show them how to use Pocket, so they can collect each AirTag I have created so they will have a summary of how to use the application.

Conclusion Working with Augmented Reality is a lot of fun. Mobile devices are increasingly driving this technology into the mobile space where the applications offer a great deal of promise (Johnson. L et al 2010:21). Applications that convey information about a place open the door to discovery-based learning. An application currently in development by the EU-funded iTacitus project (http://itacitus.org/) will allow visitors to pan across a location — the Coliseum, say — and see what it looked like during an historical event, complete with cheering spectators and competing athletes. If users get onboard with the application Sekai Camera and the AirTags are saved and archived, I cannot see no reason why this application cannot achieve this purpose.

GlossaryAirTag: A Geotagged photograph, audio file, or text file.

Air Profile: A users online profile which contains their username and email address.

Augmented Reality

Posterous: Posterous is a simple blogging platform started in May, 2009 funded by Y Combinator. It boasts integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes.

Evernote: Evernote is a collection of software and services that allows users to collect, sort, tag and annotate notes and other miscellaneous information.

LiveView: The view a user of Sekai Camera sees on their phone.

References

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

http://support.sekaicamera.com/enhttp://itacitus.org/

S p e l l e r, L 2 0 0 9 h t t p : / / c o rd i s . e u ro p a . e u / f e t c h ?CALLER=PROJ_ICT&ACTION=D&DOC=1&CAT=PROJ&QUERY=012217b2fe68:f187:491dfc2b&RCN=80182

Sigafoos, J and Green, V (Editors) 2007. USING COMPUTERS TO PROMOTE LITERACY DEVELOPMENT. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1330/1/5-Le-P.pdf

Stanton, N and Stammers, R.A COMPARISON OF STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED NAVIGATION THROUGH A CBT PACKAGE. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/b i t s t re a m / 2 4 3 8 / 2 8 2 7 / 1 / A % 2 0 C o m p a ri s o n % 2 0 o f%20Structured%20and%20Unstructured%20Navigation%20through%20a%20CBT%20package.pdf