Lawrence Walker

Creating interactive physics education books with augmented reality

Augmented Books show three-dimensional animated educational content and provide a means for students to interact with this content in an engaging learning experience. In this paper we present a framework for creating educational Augmented Reality (AR) books that overlay virtual content over real book pages. The framework features support for certain types of user interaction, model and texture animations, and an enhanced marker design suitable for educational books. Three books teaching electromagnetism concepts were created with this framework. To evaluate the effectiveness in helping students learn, we conducted a small pilot study with ten secondary school students, studying electromagnetism concepts using the three books. Half of the group used the books with the diagrams augmented, while the other half used the books without augmentation. Participants completed a pre-test, a test after the learning session and a retention test administered 1 month later. Results suggest that AR has potential to be effective in teaching complex 3D concepts.