Several educational institutions routinely recommend and use Augmented Reality in learning and teaching, for its potential benefits regarding an increase in the students' motivation and attention as well as their knowledge retention. Most of the time, though, augmented reality applications consist of rather static, single-user experiences which do not fuel collaborative learning. In this paper, we present a novel augmented reality platform whose aim is to facilitate collaboration and interaction between teachers and students by adding synchronisation and multi-user capabilities. We present a case study demonstrating the capabilities of this platform for student-teacher and student-student collaboration.
Although there are some experiences that demonstrate the validity of the use of augmented reality in schools to help students understand and retain complex concepts, augmented reality has not been widely adopted in the education sector yet. This is in part because it is hard to use augmented reality applications in collaborative learning scenarios and to integrate them in the existing school curricula. In this work, we present an interoperable architecture that simplifies the creation of augmented reality applications, enables multi-user student collaboration and provides advanced mechanisms for data analysis and visualization. A review of the literature together with a survey answered by 47 primary and secondary school teachers allowed us to identify the design objectives of cleAR, an architecture for augmented reality-based collaborative educational applications. cleAR has been validated through the development of three proofs of concept. cleAR provides a more mature technological ecosystem that will foster the emergence of augmented reality applications for education and their inclusion in existing school programs.
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