Project Based Learning + Augmented Reality
A match made in heaven?
Introduction
Project Based Learning, a learning paradigm, and Augmented Reality, a technological tool, both show very promising results when it comes to enhancing learning in schools and higher education. Additionally, both give students ways of learning that are multimodal, more engaging and more fun than both traditional and digital learning.
So what if we combine the two, using the methods from PBL and the tools from AR to create educational projects that give the pupils or students all the benefits from both?
PBL & AR Explained in Short
PBL, or Project Based Learning is formally defined as:
“…a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.”
[https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl, accessed 25th of October 2021]
According to various sources, PBL can be argued to have roots that go back as far as ancient Greece where Aristotle advocated learning by doing which was later described by John Dewey in the 1890’s. It has seen modern day recognition and gradually increasing adoption during the past 20–30 years.
AR, or Augmented Reality is defined as:
“…an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology.”
[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/augmented-reality.asp, accessed 30th of September 2021]
AR was invented in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland, the term was coined in 1990 and it has begun seeing widespread recognition and use during the past 5–10 years.
Benefits of PBL
PBL is characterised by the students being given a task (i.e. design a garden, build an app, identify a community problem and propose a solution etc.), researching ways of completing the task, describing their solutions and finally presenting these solutions. In the process they experience:
- Active engagement, by following their heart and mind when seeing solutions through their own eyes. This makes learning more meaningful.
- Deeper Learning by probing the problem and potential solutions, comparing them and researching different approaches and their benefits.
- Higher information retention, by finding the information themselves and by creating solutions through personal action.
- Enhanced group dynamics, by cooperating with others around a complex issue and collaborating to communicate the solution, hereby building relations and trust.
- Creativity, by trying to find new solutions through lateral thinking and research.
- Interactions with teachers and fellow students on a new level, by deciding what to learn and ask about, directing the teacher to the knowledge they need instead of vice versa.
- Building life-long skills, by practicing project based work and all the elements that make up a project, similar to what they will experience in a workplace.
Benefits of AR
AR can be used both as a presentation tool and a tool for augmenting learning materials, but also as a way for students to creatively work out new ways of presenting information and results through multiple modalities, using interactive 3D models, video, audio, text and gamified elements. This has proven to enhance their learning through:
- Better understanding of physical concepts and structures, by allowing them to explore 3D objects virtually in the classroom.
- Better memory retention, by serving information through multiple modalities, triggering the brain in several ways for the same information.
- Better understanding of visual concepts, numbers and maths, by giving three dimensional visualisations of geometrical and other mathematical concepts.
- Better understanding of technology and programmatic concepts.
- Enhanced collaboration and communication, by letting students work on different aspects of the same task, for example by having to combine video, images and 3D animation into a complete AR experience.
- Enhanced creative thinking, by allowing students to work with and combine different media in one creation or presentation.
AR shows many of the same benefits that PBL does and combined they can strengthen each other and deliver even more engaging learning projects with even better long term results.
To get the most out of AR, you need to let the students design and create AR experiences, not only experience them. Therefore, this is the approach to AR that we have taken when proposing the link between AR and PBL. You can read more about creation with AR in the classroom in our article Augmented Reality vs. 8th Graders — Insights from a day in school.
How can They be Combined?
While AR is suitable for working with and presenting relatively short projects, ranging from 1 hour to a few days, PBL is often used in projects that range from a week to a whole term. These differences in scope may seem like a barrier to getting the most out of both paradigm and tool, but here are two easy ways of combining them.
AR as a Tool within a PBL Project
The first and most obvious approach, would be using AR as a presentation tool within a PBL context. What we propose is having fixed presentation dates all throughout the project. For each presentation, the students must create an interactive AR poster that enables their audience to see, feel and understand the part of the problem that is being explained. These posters would then be available throughout the project as well as after completion, so that both the group members themselves and others can always visit them to learn or jog their memory.
The final presentation would be a combination of the posters that have already been created during the process, as well as an extra layer to bind them together. Perhaps a gamification element, as well as a public presentation of the project and the proposed solutions.
You could also work with other means of delivery than posters, such as locations or objects, whereby the information is contextualized to a greater degree.
A Shorter PBL Project with AR as the only Presentation Tool
The second approach is to run a shorter project (2–5 days), where the problem has a smaller scope. This could be the creation and presenting of an interactive short story about the students’ everyday lives and thoughts, enabling them to better understand each other’s similarities and differences. Or it could be proposing small interior changes to the school or classroom that the students’ feel would promote well-being and a good learning environment. Or it could even be something as simple as creating interactive exercise posters with videos or 3D animations showing how to do the exercises properly, perhaps combined with information on the muscle groups and how they look inside the body. Anything is possible, across a range of subjects.
These kinds of projects would allow the students to both cooperate, research and create material for their AR presentations, while working on and thinking deeper about things that are personal or create real value for themselves and their peers.
Conclusion
There are obvious ways of combining PBL and AR to get the most out of both worlds, enhancing the students’ learning and experiences in the learning environment. Letting students dive into topics and research them in depth, finding their own personal ways of perception and then letting them present these through the multimodal medium that is AR can bring a lot of value and ultimately the whole will be greater than the sum of its’ parts.
