Making With Understanding: Using Augmented Reality to Support Peer Teaching in Makerspaces

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The project will develop and investigate Augmented Reality-enabled knowledge exchange tools that enhance the support of collaborative learning in informal learning spaces such as makerspaces. Makerspaces offer opportunities to tinker with physical and digital tools, and promote engagement in interest-driven, inquiry-based learning. Within this context, learners informally teach STEM concepts to each other, which has a direct impact on collaboration and learning. Many physical phenomena, such as magnetism, are largely invisible to the naked eye (e.g. one cannot see the flow of electricity in a wire, or the shape of magnetic fields around a motor). This limitation creates challenges for learning and collaboration in makerspaces and elsewhere. Without seeing this content, a novice will have difficulties understanding when a more knowledgeable peer offers explanations about the invisible variables. In makerspaces, this limitation causes students to focus primarily on doing (i.e., assembling a working prototype, or fixing other students' problems) and less on understanding (i.e., grasping why something is happening, or teaching the underlying reasons to less knowledgeable peers). To investigate these issues, the project will develop and empirically test AR-enabled experiences and tools to augment invisible phenomena to the naked eye into physical objects built in the makerspace. The learning tools will involve the development of user-generated interactive visualizations and annotations that connect physical objects with invisible variables, to facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer. Augmented reality (AR) makes it possible to design activities where learners may "see" hidden forces as holographic overlays, and peers may communicate by creating holographic representations on the physical objects they are discussing. The final deliverable will be tested in a maker spaces and integrated into a course about digital fabrication in education. The objective is to develop knowledge-transfer tools that will move students from merely doing to actually understanding how complex systems work. An open source toolkit will be generated so that people around the world can use the digital toolkit and/or expand upon it.The larger goal of this project is to accelerate knowledge transfer and STEM learning, by providing students with tools for more efficient communication and learning, and which can potentially transform misconceptions into correct understandings of complex scientific ideas. This project will develop AR features that target one-on-one peer knowledge exchanges. The research studies will investigate their impact on communication, collaboration and learning in experimental and ecological settings. The project will conduct several successive studies. In the first phase of the research, the project will investigate how knowledge-transfer behaviors occur in traditional maker spaces under the presence and absence of AR simulations and determine what novel features can be implemented in an AR toolkit in order to support and improve knowledge exchange. The study activity will require participants to understand a simple electric circuit that generates different frequencies into the speaker. In the second phase, the project will research the effectiveness of knowledge transfer when involved in an activity typical of makerspaces, such as debugging complex electronics systems. After doing preliminary research with participants face-to-face, the research will locate participants in separate rooms (each room containing more specialized equipment), where they will remotely interact in constructing or understanding a system where the components of one participant are connected with the components of the other participant. This will allow for evaluating whether the new AR tools are effective in improving knowledge transfer. In the final year the project will ecologically evaluate the effectiveness of the system by integrating the technology into a maker space, as well as including it into a 4-month class on digital fabrication taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At the end of the research, the project expects to have a deeper understanding of what learning tools or features are valuable in a more open-ended ecologically-valid context, how to effectively integrate such AR tools in existing maker spaces, and how they are used by students in formal learning environments and can complement classroom pedagogy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.