What did the customer ask for?
The goal of this trial is to test an innovative approach in the use of Mixed Reality in education: instead of representing “objects”, as in typical Mixed Reality applications, “concepts” are represented (in the form of multimedia materials: texts, writings, videos, images … supported by geometric shapes). The idea is to give through mixed reality a strong trigger to increase motivation and involvement, as well as the skills of collaboration among the participants.
- Customer
High School, 5th year
Solution
We organize an experiment in a high school of Milano “Liceo classico Parini”, on the topic of the bird of Nation State in Europe.
We create 3 different session in our app TINALP: first one to approach the MR devices, second one with the MR experience itself and final one to discuss about the experience and collect feedbacks. In the MR experience students were involved into two activities: in the “Right or wrong?” game the students are presented with statements and they have to decide whether they are correct or not, piling up the correct ones in order to score points; in the “Conceptual Maps” activity, they have a number of statements at their disposal and they need to combine them into a map, adding lines and arrows in the virtual space, following a prompt (e.g. “what are the pillars of a nation-state?”).
The most relevant data from the questionnaire are:
- 66% of students would have preferred to have preliminary training sessions on the use of augmented reality tools, to be readier;
- the more traditional activities, such as quizzes and the open answer on Google form, were judged interesting and fun (grades above 3, always on a scale of 1 to 5); this figure confirms the success of the overall design of the experience, where these more traditional components were introduced not to let some students idle while the others were experimenting the MR activities;
- the self assessment of the commitment in studying the contents (interviews) at home was quite good: 3.18 out of 5. this data is important because it confirms the possibility for the experience as a whole to foster a didactic impact;
- the appreciation of the collaboration with peers during the MR sessions is good: 3.55 out of 5.
