Designing Student Interactions to Explore Systems Thinking in Augmented Reality

Abstract

Educational practices are shifting to incorporate new curriculum guidelines and new technologies. At the same time, the field of augmented reality (AR) is rapidly expanding, enabling a new world of opportunities and requiring new approaches to UI/UX design. Incorporating Augmented Reality into classrooms provides a unique opportunity to create engaging, immersive, and transportative learning experiences. The following work explores the intersection of these threads, asking, how do we start designing for student interactions within the augmented classroom. These discussions will be rooted in WIT, a project which is aimed at exploring how headset based AR can be used to teach complex-systems learning in middle school classrooms as well as providing a platform to develop similar experiences. These concepts will also be discussed at a broader scale, first presenting considerations based on the affordances of AR and current education practices, then diving into the technology underpinning these ideas.