Co-designing augmented reality books: connections between student distributed cognition and technology design

Thesis

This study focuses on the relationship between community-based knowledge construction and participatory technology design. Contextualized against digital divide research, the goals of this study are twofold: understand how students from a low socioeconomic background perceive an emerging technology as a tool to learn with and understand how the iterative and inherently reflective process of technology design may influence student knowledge construction. Grounded in distributed cognition theory, this study examines this relationship by co-designing an augmented reality book with an eighth-grade class in New England, USA. Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that allows users to place virtual models into the physical world using a mobile device or headset. The students created a book about COVID-19 and worked with the researcher to build an iOS app that projected virtual models atop the book. The analysis answers questions about how students perceive and use AR as a tool to learn with, demonstrating that students use AR as an exploratory tool, first broadly across a diverse set of topics, and then deeper into specific details. The study also examines the influence of iteration, observing how students switched between roles of producer and consumer as they sought to improve the app, thereby encouraging critical reflection on the material. Ultimately, this study shows the ways in which individual students used the unique affordances of AR to contribute and modify information for the advancement of the community’s knowledge.

Authors: Mahadevan, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-5r95wpxy4
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: co-design; education technology; community knowledge building; distributed cognition; DSC2022; participatory design; participatory methods; DSC; augmented reality; technology design
• Subjects: Education; Educational technology; Augmented reality