AR Experiences for Disaster Preparedness: Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Settings
After reading Kazuhiro Yonemoto’s article Reinforcing International Students’ Language Skills for Disaster Preparedness¹, I was quite enthralled by the ways that augmented-reality (AR) technology was leveraged in such a serious setting. Much like the notion of serious games as a whole, once technologies hit the entertainment market and succeed they often are boxed within a label of being quite… unserious.
However, this article made me realize how vital it is that we change this widely-accepted perception. Augmented reality technologies afford many capabilities that expand far past those exemplified within leisure games like Pokémon Go². Around the world, we have a multitude of different emergencies that we have learned to adapt to and plan for (at least, to the best of our current abilities). Within these new situations and intense plans, it is easy for even those with language fluency to get lost and caught up in the moment. Just think of how terrifying it would be for those who do not understand the native language to experience a disaster.
Within her presentation Engaging a BiLingual Classroom Using Machine Translation³, Pamela Doran recounts her experience assisting a speaker of Spanish during a practice drill using technology. She says:
