Navigating An Educational Experience By Augmenting Our Reality (NEEAR)

Challenge

How can mobile augmented reality invite learners to explore an outdoor location guided by an expert and their views within an outdoor environment?

Our Solution

Mobile technologies, such as tablets, allow learners to pass through physical locations accessing resources and information on how an expert may see a site. Situated learning or situated cognition theory proposes that cognitive learning or knowledge is not fully understood until it is applied in a social or physical context.

NEEAR is an augmented reality application that invites a learner to explore Strawberry Creek at UC Berkeley. We designed new technical and UI/UX interactions with tablet devices, affording a learner to navigate their own experience to explore ecological systems with an expert. Our high fidelity prototype application was developed on the ASUS™ Transformer Prime Tablet running on the Android platform. Through user testing, we found that a learner can learn and access an expert’s experience. We found that the combination of situated learning, augmented reality and expert views hold a lot of potential in the future of education.