Chris Dede
At this suburban Boston middle school, aliens have landed. A team of seventh graders armed with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and handheld computers wander the school field trying to figure out why aliens are there. However, the path to finding the right answer is getting a bit challenging.
“It’s asking us to do algebra,” says one boy to another.
Solving math problems, translating Latin and Greek, interviewing virtual characters, and working with other students are all aspects of Alien Contact! — the augmented reality (AR) game that the students are playing. The game is the brainchild of the Handheld Augmented Reality Project (HARP) — developed by the Ed School and the Teacher Education Program at M.I.T. with funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Star Schools Program grant — an effort to improve middle school mathematics and literacy by leveraging emerging technologies. HARP is one of the first university projects to study whether augmented reality — a simulated real world environment through a handheld computer — can enhance students’ learning.
For the past year, Professor Chris Dede, postdoctoral fellow Matt Dunleavy, and HARP researchers have worked on developing AR curricula aligned to national and state standards, and studying AR’s effects on student engagement and learning.
“Too often education is the last sector of society to incorporate new interactive media, even though students are already using these in the rest of their lives for entertainment, communication, and personal expression,” Dede says. “We already know that laptops can be valuable to students. And yet there are new, less expensive, and more portable technologies today that create interesting alternatives for learning.”
While educators often fear technology, Dunleavy says it is critical to consider how emerging technologies like cell phones can play a role in education.
“Cell phones and video games are a large part of K-12 students’ lives, but not within the regular school day,” Dunleavy says. “A lot of students are bringing cell phones to school, but educators don’t currently know how to leverage them for instruction.”
Dede concurs. “We are agnostic about the technology,” he says. “Obviously, we think [AR] has promise or we wouldn’t explore it.”
In Alien Contact!, students use GPS-enable Dell Axim handheld computers that correlate their real world locations to their virtual locations in the game’s digital world. As the students move around a physical location, such as their school playground or sports fields, a map on their handheld displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in an augmented reality world superimposed on real space. This capability parallels the new means of information gathering, communication, and expression made possible by emerging interactive media (such as web-enabled, GPS-equipped cell phones with text messaging, video, and camera features).
Alien Contact’s mission is to challenge teams of students to solve problems through proportional reasoning, justify their thinking with peers, and use technology as a means of representation and interpretation. In addition, the simulation also puts math into a more comprehensible format than writing an equation on a chalkboard might.
“I felt excited about the possibility of taking technology that students are intrigued by and fluent in and using it to teach mathematics in a way that simulates and enhances reality,” says doctoral student Rebecca Mitchell, a former math teacher who works on developing the game’s curriculum.
“Students can really act as though they are CIA agents trying to figure out why aliens have been found on earth through augmented reality. At the same time, I wanted to make sure the curriculum is created carefully, as too often I have encountered curriculum that was showy or exciting but with little quality in terms of mathematics instruction.”
Alien Contact! has been piloted in two Massachusetts schools so far. Based upon preliminary data, AR is a highly engaging environment for students who struggle within the limited instructional approach of a traditional classroom. The issue of engagement isn’t the biggest concern, Dunleavy says. “Alien Contact! is driven by pop culture…. We thought about what kids were interested in and designed around these topics,” he says. “The challenge is figuring out how to leverage the technology using good pedagogy that will translate into meaningful learning.”
For Ed School researchers, another question is how to measure the effects of augmented reality on students’ learning when, as Dede cautions, they aren’t straightforward.
“What constitutes success?” Dede asks. “If the test scores are identical compared to conventional curricula, but the students are also mastering 21st century skills and are excited about learning, then these are other important dimensions of educational quality to consider.”
With the way technology is headed, Dede and Dunleavy foresee potential in Alien Contact!, especially considering that students could easily be carrying GPS-embedded smartphones to school within the next five years. It’s still too premature to know how augmented reality will really fit into education’s future, however.
“Often people look at technology as a panacea for all the challenges facing education, but I don’t,” Dunleavy says. “It is not really about the technology. It’s about how teachers can use technologies such as augmented reality to engage, instruct, and empower their students in meaningful ways.”
