Developing Augmented Reality Experiences for Natural and Cultural History Education

Développer des expériences de réalité augmentée pour l'enseignement de l'histoire naturelle et culturelle

Erica Hargreave, Ahimsa Media / StoryToGo / BCIT

Track: Institutional technology/ Volet: La technologie institutionnelle

Type: One-hour hands-on workshop

With the ever increasing experiences that immersive media hold for students in allowing them to enter new worlds, travel back in time, visit the other side of the planet, explore the inner workings of our body, and more, the possibilities are exciting, especially if you can get students themselves creating immersive experiences. Many students (and educators) will have already done so with virtual reality, but fewer with augment reality. That's what we'll be exploring in this workshop. 

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience where our real, physical world is digitally augmented. The augmentation is usually visual in current applications, though it can also be through other senses, such as auditory or haptic. There are three basic features of AR: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects. 

Having explored the challenges and solutions for both experiencing and creating AR for the Story Steppers AR experiences for natural and cultural history education, we are sharing what we've discovered with other educators. Our aim being to make augmented reality more accessible and less daunting to other educators by sharing ways that AR can both be used and created in the classroom.

Learning objectives: In this workshop, we aim to: 

• define augmented reality 
• differentiate augment reality from virtual reality and mixed reality 
• participate in different augment reality experiences 
• identify different challenges with utilizing AR with students 
• brainstorm solutions to utilizing AR with students 
• explore different ways of creating AR experiences for / or with your students 
• experiment with designing a simple AR experience