Lim, Kenneth Yang Teck

This paper describes a learning activity using Augmented Reality (AR) which seeks to take advantage of the potential for learning about history and culture through exploration. This is represented by a garden in a university campus that affords visitors a scaffolded experience comprising a game-driven narrative in which visitors to the garden may assume the roles of different protagonists. In addition, we also sought to design a paper- based board-game for visitors who are not yet able to visit the garden in person. Both aspects of the learning activity – namely, the game-driven narratives in the actual garden as well as in the board-game equivalent – were piloted in December 2020. The study suggests that a combination of Augmented Reality, storyline and role-play could increase the probability of encounters with spontaneous elements in learners’ local environments that encourage learning.

Serious games have showcased tremendous potential in transforming the way we teach and learn. This paper explores the potential affordances of Augmented Reality (AR) game-based learning, specifically in the context of preserving school heritage. The AR game-based learning experience is proposed to increase students’ knowledge of their school’s heritage. By incorporating digital technology and story-telling, the game is also proposed to make the subject of school heritage more tangible for the enhancement of learning. The study involves 10 students playing an AR adventure role-playing game (RPG) which uses device location within the campus of Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore, to trigger in-game events. To assess the effectiveness of the AR game-based experience as a medium for learning, a general survey is used to collect feedback about the gameplay experience, while a Situational Interest survey collects data about participants’ situational interest, which emerges in response to the learning environment created, using the Situational Interest Scale (Chen et al., 1999). Results confirmed a positive correlation between players’ situational interest and absorption of information, shed light on the significance of game design elements in influencing the gameplay experience, and pointed to specific rooms for improvement for future AR game-based learning environments. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an understanding of the wider effectiveness of game-based learning environments in educational contexts.

This study describes an approach to History education which leverages Augmented Reality (AR). It supplements work reported in Lim & Lim (2020) and shares how the profiles of participants and their respective responses to the intervention might be represented in forms not previously reported, with a view to increasing intelligibility of the data. The intervention aimed to explore the affordances of AR in mediating learner-initiated construction of representations of their memory palaces / method of loci, using the Learner-Generated Augmentation approach described in Lim et al. (2018), as applied to the memorization of historical facts. In this activity, participants used a free AR mobile application - Just a Line - to sketch out memory palaces of key information from a prose passage. This activity was trialled on student-teachers who are majoring in History at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. The resulting dataset was relatively complex, not least because the constructions of the memory palaces were potentially in three dimensions and overlain on the local environments of each participant. A contribution of this paper is the proposal of a format for representing such datasets to facilitate analyses and subsequent scaling.