Augmented Learning

(Transcript from Dr de Byl’s inaugural lecture given 5th June, 2009)

Hi, I’m Dr Penny de Byl, Associate Professor of Serious games here at NHTV. For those of you who don’t know me, my background is in computer science and artificial intelligence. Before moving to Breda from Australia last year I was the manager of a research and development lab at the University of Southern Queensland managing a team creating Serious Games and investigating the use of Virtual Worlds in teaching and learning.

Today I would like to introduce you to a teaching and learning methodology which has the potential to produce educational environments which integrate both real world activities and emerging technologies: …… Augmented Learning!

You might be thinking that Augmented Learning is a new concept in teaching and learning.

The fact is though that classroom augmentation has always been used in education.

Augmented Learning is simply the use of artifacts to modify normal teaching and learning situations in an endeavor to immerse and engage students
within the learning context.

I am sure many of you here today have augmented a teaching environment with props, computer games, simulations or other forms of multimedia in an attempt as providing your students with a richer learning experience.

One of the first memories I have of using props in the classroom to augment my students’ learning experience is from 1992. It was my first year as a university tutor and I was teaching astronomy to first year students. This was before high quality computer games when the best computer access one could hope for at a university came in the form of a laboratory of black and green dumb terminals accessing a UNIX network. Luckily, this particular augmented learning experience did not require computers.

I took the whole class outside to the closest football field armed with eight Styrofoam balls of varying sizes and large distance tape measures from the physics lab. Each of the balls represented one of the planets in our solar system. The students were required to recreate the expanse of the solar system according to the relative sizes of the balls such that Pluto’s orbit fell on the 100 metre line. Unfortunately, Pluto was about the size of a sesame seed and the student in charge of it inevitably dropped it; lost forever in the grass. This student ended up representing Pluto by standing at the far end of the field.

This exercise was designed to teach two things; the enormous expanse of the solar system and the relative size of planets within that space. The students had to work together to calculate the distances between the planets based on the size of the balls, measure the distances out on the ground and position the planets.

This augmented learning activity was fully immersive for the students as they were bodily involved; physically and kinetically contained within the simulated environment; a key and essential characteristic of successful learning activities as emphasized by many learning style researchers. Without having considered it, I had given the students presence within a simulated learning environment.

Making educational activities fun, immersive and engaging is one of the goals that I, and I’m sure the teachers here today, strive to embed in their teaching. When we think of fun there is an immediate tendency to think towards games. Games not only make education fun but they can also place learners into realistic role-playing situations with a set of goals to achieve.

Compared to other traditional teaching and learning activities such as conventional lecture/study approaches; these types of games have been found to significantly increase student knowledge levels, significantly improve retention and student interest, be more effective in assisting positive attitude change towards subjects, increase motivation and interest and provide a similar learning experience in mechanical instruction as actual hands-on experience.

These advantages of using games in teaching situations all come from studies into real-world games, role-playing and simulation. The reference given here are games that did not require the use of a computer or other type of electronic technology.

However, emerging technologies are a part of life and quickly find their way into the classroom: why?

In 2001, Marc Prensky, outspoken educational technologist coined the term “Digital Natives” to describe students who had grown up with technology.

The reaction to Prensky’s “Digital Natives” description has seen many educators challenge traditional teaching methods and has them scrambling to design, develop and integrate the latest technologies into the classroom in unconventional ways.

Today’s students demand more from their educational experiences than flat pages of content, un-interactive videos and text based communication software. Educational materials deemed acceptable in the past now fail to engage students who are more attuned to the high quality 3D entertainment software such as computer games.

If we examine the rate at which research is being published in the area of game based learning, we can see educators taking up the call to arms. The domains of “Serious Games”, “Game Based Learning” and Edutainment have all experienced considerable growth. If we examine the research we find a trend away from the augmented, prop-based, real-world games and into the virtual.

Interestingly enough, I’d like to point out two moments in history which I believe impacted on the growth of games-based learning:

the first commercially available microprocessor being released by Intel in 1971 and

in 1993 Id Software’s release of their landmark DOOM game.

How do these affect the growth of computer games-based learning? First, the Intel chip made home computing an affordable reality which also lead to their use in the classroom and Second, DOOM not only pioneered immersive 3D graphics and networked multiplayer gaming on the PC but it also brought power to the people by providing support for customized expansion. Allowing players to create their own content.

Some enterprising and motivated educators are using computer games in their classrooms to supplement traditional learning activities. They do not necessarily have the expertise to create their own games and have found a solution in existing computer games, customized computer games and virtual environments.

Commercial Off-The-Shelf Games otherwise known as COTS have found uses in the classroom beyond the vision of the original designer.

For example, a primary school in Denmark is using The Sims 2 to teach Danish through game play, image capture and finally a word processed report on the students’ favourite characters.

Schools in Scotland have used the Nintendo DS game “Brain Training” for numeracy and Nintendogs for literacy.

A rural secondary school in South France uses Farm Frenzie to improve students’ methodological skills and in Austria Zoo Tycoon 2 is being used to teach German literacy in primary schools.

The use of these games, as suggested, occurs off the shelf. These games do not need to be modified but are used as a motivational tool to engage students in an
activity embedded within other teaching techniques. Other uses of COTS in game based learning occur when the games are modifiable allowing custom content and game play to be added and edited by students and teachers.

The process of changing a game through built in tools is called modding (the very concept introduced in DOOM).

NeverWinter nights (a role playing game), for example, has been modded into a game called Disaster At Harperville by educators at the University of Minnesota to teach journalism students the strategies of information collection.

An American Revolution Mod for Civilisation 4 (a strategy game) is being used at University of Kansas to teach history and a series of mods to the Unreal Tournament engine have been produced as an activity kit for teaching physics to secondary school students.

The other option for educators wanting to engage their students with games are purpose built serious games. Though the cost of development of these professional applications is often beyond justification of educational institutions, they are embraced for use by the industry and military. Some examples include:

Pulse, developed by BreakAway Games for the US military for evacuation medical treatment training in combat situations.

Palastine, developed by Serious Games Interactive in which the player is a journalist experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Remission, developed by Hope Lab. A game designed to engage young cancer patients through entertaining play while impacting specific psychological and behavioral outcomes associated with successful cancer treatement.

The Visible Body, developed by Argosy. A comprehensive human anatomy visualization tool including over 1,700 anatomical structures including all major organs and systems of the human body.

and

SimPort, developed by Tygron, The Port of Rotterdam, TU Delft. The games objective to assist the port of rotterdam employees in individually and collectively making appropriate planning and implementation decisions to lead to a workable design for reclaiming the next lot of land from the North-Sea over a 30-year period.

And next,

probably the most successful gaming technology used in educational institutions which has found a considerable critical mass:…. the virtual online world.

The most successful of these to date being Second Life.

Not the first online virtual world and it won’t be the last, however Second Life provides educators the ability to create something that looks like a 3D game and includes a suite of collaboration tools. It hit the public at the very time teachers were looking for such an application and as a bonus it was at the right price – free! (… well almost free)

The attraction of such environments to educators in particular is the accessibility, ease of use and low cost of the environments. Educators can create online virtual worlds in a bid to attract and engage their students with digital media and particularly, something that looks like a game. Someone else hosts and maintains the servers, thus removing internal ICT departments from the equation (until a network port needs to be opened) and unlike the latest 3D high quality games the clients don’t require the latest graphics card to be installed on the users machine, loads of virtual memory or console devices and controllers.

Today there are some 260 educational institutions currently engaged in Second Life activities. And a further 122 universities and schools have virtual campuses and courses in Active Worlds (a Second Life competitor).

Educators internationally are using online virtual worlds for a large and diverse number of teaching and learning applications. The variety of the domains being explored is nothing more than astonishing.

For example,

At the University of Florida, computer programming students are using Second Life to explore the aesthetics of viewing software as art rather than pure functionality. Teams of students use programming languages such as Java, Python and Lisp to create visual representations of simple finite state machines, neural networks and Turing machines.

A group of midwifery teachers from a variety of New Zealand universities are designing, building and evaluating the effectiveness of Virtual Birthing Suites for teaching midwifery practices.

The University of California, Davis has created a virtual hallucination facility which aims to provide visitors with an understanding of schizophrenia by simulating the experience of the visual and aural hallucinations.

Harvard University presents a course in the virtual space on the creation and delivery of persuasive arguments for courts of law.

And last, but not least:

The University of Arizona’s astronomy class has students create, research, build, and script exhibits for milestones in the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history.

Over the past 5 years, the number of educators building and experimenting in Second Life has grown significantly.

So much so that there is a tremendous community of practice and non-profit organisations (such as the New Media Consortium) which are more than willing to help educators through the initial steep learning curve towards building their first space in the virtual world.

With the introduction of these technologies the normal classroom situation has seen face-to-face interactions intercepted by the computer.

The proceeding examples of game based learning place all the action behind the computer screen. In essence the screen becomes a fourth-wall to the virtual environment – allowing us to see in – in the same way television does, but not allowing the content to come out into the real world.

Research has found that such technologies isolate students, emotionally and physically, from direct experience with the world.

They promote a distant education paradigm in which they are forced to interact with a computer other than each other. This is the opposite of what research has shown students require; a strengthening of the bonds between themselves and their teachers.

The U.S. National Science Board has report prolonged exposure to such environments can create individuals incapable of dealing with the chaos of real life, building social networks and communities and personal commitments.

Furthermore, students working on separate computers do not perform as well as they do in groups huddled around a single machine. However, today’s immersive online virtual environments and classroom computer games force students into this situation.

Students who can see each other and share the same collaboration space experience far superior communication as they are exposed to gaze, gesture and nonverbal behaviours.

Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives”, badge is often quoted in game based learning literature to justify the use of technology in the classroom.

Prensky clarifies his position on games in education saying:

“If educators want to have relevance in this century, it is crucial that we find ways to engage students in school. Because common sense tells us that we will never have enough truly great teachers to engage these students in the old ways—through compelling lectures from those rare, charismatic teachers, for example—we must engage them in the 21st century way: electronically. Not through expensive graphics or multimedia, but through what the kids call ‘gameplay.”

So how can we take technology and gameplay in the classroom to the next level

and encourage students to directly experience the real world filled with rich virtual content and interaction with each other?

With technology playing an every increasing role in our lives and being a motivating factor in getting students to engage in class our task has become one of finding a happy medium between the advantages of sophisticated technology including rich interactive multimedia, artificial intelligence, realtime 2D and 3D simulations of otherwise inaccessible objects and environments with traditional tactile and personalized classrooms.

One such domain with this potential is the newly redefined and technology enabled field of Augmented Learning.

Augmented Learning is a teaching and learning method whereby the real world is adapted with props and contextual information to provide an immersive and authentic learning environment for students. Modifying the traditional classroom setting in this way is not a new idea as I have already discussed.

However, today, Augmented Learning as a domain is tightly coupled with technology due to the endless possibilities the media provides to adapt a learning situation to a student’s needs. Examples include supplemented contextual content such as that you might receive from an iPod while walking through a museum, pop-up windows on e-learning websites and location-based information obtained from a GPS device.

Eric Klopfer from MIT, in his book, Augmented Learning, illustrates an effective outdoor activity called “Environmental Detectives” in which teams of students act as consultants who have to produce a report on possible causes of (fictional) contaminated groundwater found on campus before the Environmental Protection Agency enforcers arrive for their annual visit. The game takes place geographically on the real campus and students must navigate their way around to take soil and water samples and hold interviews with relevant staff members (also fictional) in order to write their report.

A GPS enabled mobile device is used to simulate the taking and testing of samples as well as watch pre-recorded video information from staff members whom the students need to geographically locate.

The game illustrates how relatively simple technical requirements when integrated within the real world provide complex problem solving scenarios involving scientific, social, economic, legal and public policy implications.

Along these same lines, in 2005, the Waag Society in partnership with the Amsterdam Montessori Comprehensive School developed a history game called Frequency 1550 which transported students to medieval Amsterdam. The technical part of the game is simply a series of GPS locations on a mobile phone in which students track points of interest and each other.

The students need to demonstrate their knowledge of medieval Amsterdam by performing location-based media-assignments on the city’s history.

Of more importance to the multimedia, entertainment and gaming communities is the link Augmented Reality with Augmented Learning.

Although augmented reality technologies have existed since 1968 their use in mainstream e-learning, games, simulations and other domains has not begun to occur until recently due to the restrictive and technically challenging nature of the available toolkits and the expensive and heavy, mobility-restricting equipment required to run the applications.

Today however we are at the beginning of a new frontier of possibilities as almost everyone carries with them a relatively inexpensive viewing device, computer processor and camera in their pockets.

Although augmenting reality refers to the use of technology to change or enhance the real world whether it be by adding music, using computer simulations or projecting images onto a wall the current most popular method is 2D marker tracking. In short, this works by taking a live video feed from the real world, having a computer program identify special patterns and their orientation and then projecting 2D or 3D content in real time such that the real and virtual appear to be one.

And this is the very thing you have been watching occur right here.

Whether it be through

· projectors which turn table tops into electronic workstations,

· mobile devices which can show up virtual objects

· gaming consoles with unique game ideas,

Or

· Brochures brought to life when viewed via your webcam

Augmented Reality is now accessible by everyone

And more importantly ….. by students and educators. More than any other emerging technology, augmented reality is available in classrooms though the use of standard everyday accessible and popular hardware.

This new evolution of Augmented Learning leads us into a realm of new possibilities for immersive and engaging education. Taking students away from the computer screens and having them interact with each other while at the same time supporting a suite of teaching and learning experiences that are unique compared with current e-learning technologies.

The augmented educational activities created through the integration of the real world and computer gaming technology can be distinctively structured.

The augmented world creates a tangible experience that captures the essence of being in a particular place or context, and replaces the traditional computer interface which sits between a learner and their computer-based educational material.

This immersion enables learners to negotiate meaning based on their own personal cognitive, affective and kinaesthetic experiences and assumes learners will construct knowledge through non-symbolic, non-reflective, first-person psychological activity that occurs when they interact directly with the real world.

Once immersed within an augmented world, learners can communicate, investigate and experiment either individually or in the company of other learners, to transcend geographical and temporal boundaries while the authentic experiences of these low risk non-threatening environments encourages participation and risk taking.

Some of these situations include:

· Augmented Learning Books where the pages literally come alive

· Realtime generation of 3D models from blueprints

· Video content inserted into newspapers

· Looking beneath the surface of everyday objects

· Looking closer at details

· Access to live, on demand, location-based information

· Experiencing worlds we might never be able to visit and

· Becoming someone or something else

All of these Augmented Learning experiences are possible with existing technology, some of them already exist and some of them are just ideas.

Not only that, but they use technology that is readily available to the educator at very little expense.

Almost every laptop has a camera. Webcams are inexpensive and most classrooms are equipped with projectors….. And even the occasional student has a mobile phone with a camera.

However, while Augmented Learning has the potential to allow both educators and students to engage with content and processes at a deeper level than via other existing methods, there is no dispute creating such activities is beyond the technical skills of most already overworked educators. Adding to this, for under-funded teaching institutions, professional quality Augmented Learning applications are extremely expensive to create. Although Augmented Reality is beginning to pop up everywhere it is only the technically adept users and organisations who can currently author and create content.

The single major obstacle in seeing Augmented Learning applications and associated technologies in the classroom reach critical mass is convincing the educators themselves they can become the content designers of these highly immersive educational environments. As we’ve seen with other social software environments such as Second Life, Moodle, Google Earth and Facebook it is possible for educators, students, academics and the industry to work together to empower all users to contribute to the maintenance and development of a platform.

In the past, I have been responsible for the development of 3D Online Multiuser environments and the creation of Serious Games, I believe the lessons my team and I learned during this time are just as valuable to this new and emerging domain of Augmented Learning.

I suggest the domain requires:

Easy to use all in one editors

In the wake of some popular game engines used in education such as DXStudio, Unity3D and Shiva, an editing environment which is “almost” as easy to use as drag-n-dropping your way to a 3D scene is required to create augmented content.

Next

Cross-platform interoperability

Teaching and Learning applications do not have the same audience of die-hard users as games. Ensuring Augmented Learning applications reach the biggest audience is a case of making it accessible on the largest variety of platforms possible taking into consideration the low hardware specifications of most computers in schools.

And

Communities of Practice

Being the sole developer or even a member of a small team within a large institution creating Augmented Learning content is very isolating. As is the case with many game engines, they have a large following and active online community. These communities maintain forums which members (for free) can register with. As these groups are usually international help is available 24 hours. An Augmented Learning community would not only disseminate research and knowledge about the domain but members could share information and obtain advice on their own work.

Also

Free and Open Source Assets

As will be apparent to anyone who has created 3D models and animations it is often difficult and time consuming. The creation of such assets is best left to the artist. As such there is a wealth of free and open source models available for download on the web. As Augmented Reality environments leverage the power of game and game-like engines the creators can also tap into these communities for content.

Lastly, the developer should ensure a sound return on investment. A current issue in serious games research is that of the evaluation of effective learning in games and whether or not they justify the return on investment. While research has found that games motivate and engage students, their learning effectiveness is not clear. A major study into the use of games in schools by European Schoolnet recently released a report concluding the past 20 years of research into the effectiveness of games in the classroom reveals very mixed results though they do show that skills, knowledge and attitudes of students can be improved through games. Whether or not their effectiveness justifies the investment into their creation is not clear. As with the domain of Games-Based Learning, Augmented Learning must be soundly researched regarding its educational value.

To conclude:

We are on the cusp of the apex of an Augmented Reality hype-cycle. Augmented Reality applications (especially those involving 2D markers) are becoming increasingly popular. Currently we are seeing a mass of interest in this technology due to the coming of age of more powerful and camera equipped hand-held mobile devices.

Augmented Reality can be experienced by the consumer through Coke a Cola and General Electric advertising, the release of the latest Startrek movie and a teasers for Ubisoft’s next release of the Assassin Creed’s game series.

For researchers and industry involved in the development of this domain, the current peak of interest could be providing unwanted publicity in the form of trivial but novel demonstrations which will eventually become run-of-the mill taking popular interest in the technology down into a trough of disillusionment as people start to wonder what else it is good for.

However, I believe what is required is significant investment in examining the real potentials of this technology beyond simple parlor tricks, the gathering of concrete research data into its application potential and unleashing its use through the use of easy-to-use open tools and a supportive community of practice into the education domain.

Finally, I’d like to share with you a video clip of an augmented learning application concept I found just a couple of weeks ago.

I hope it sparks your imagination as it has mine.

Thank-YOU