How can AR technology enhance children to learn new things with MEL Kids sets?

How to use AR technology to learn new things with children

When de­vel­op­ing MEL Kids, we sought to in­cor­po­rate the best of ex­ist­ing tech­nolo­gies to pro­duce a co­he­sive, com­pre­hen­sive prod­uct. AR in par­tic­u­lar caught our at­ten­tion as a po­ten­tial­ly valu­able study aid.

Our re­search led us to an in­ter­est­ing re­view ded­i­cat­ed to the ARG­BL ap­proach (Aug­ment­ed Re­al­i­ty Game-Based Learn­ing) in oblig­a­tory ed­u­ca­tion. Greek and British sci­en­tists teamed up to an­a­lyze 21 pa­pers (pub. 2012-2017) on this top­ic, 14 of which cov­ered pri­ma­ry school, and 7 sec­ondary school. They came to the fol­low­ing con­clu­sions:

“The ma­jor­i­ty of pri­ma­ry ed­u­ca­tion stud­ies (50%) re­port­ed that AR ap­pli­ca­tions com­bined with game-based learn­ing led to “bet­ter learn­ing per­for­mance and/or learn­ing gains” in ed­u­ca­tion­al set­tings. In ad­di­tion, 21.4% of stud­ies sug­gest in­creas­es in “stu­dent mo­ti­va­tion and en­gage­ment”, and 14.3% ar­tic­u­late im­prove­ments in both “stu­dents’ pos­i­tive per­cep­tion and at­ti­tudes” and “stu­dent in­ter­ac­tion/so­cial­i­sa­tion/col­lab­o­ra­tion”. Sim­i­lar find­ings came from sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion, with 57.1% of stud­ies re­port­ing “bet­ter learn­ing per­for­mance and/or learn­ing gains”. 28.6% iden­ti­fy an in­crease in “stu­dent mo­ti­va­tion and en­gage­ment”, 14.3% an in­crease in “stu­dents’ pos­i­tive at­ti­tudes”, and 14.3% an in­crease in “stu­dent in­ter­ac­tion/so­cial­i­sa­tion/col­lab­o­ra­tion”. ¹

This and sim­i­lar stud­ies led us to the de­ci­sion to en­hance MEL Kids sets with AR tech­nolo­gies to clar­i­fy and en­liv­en the con­cepts un­der con­sid­er­a­tion, and in­crease the ed­u­ca­tion­al and en­ter­tain­ment val­ue of the prod­uct si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly. We sin­cere­ly be­lieve that chil­dren who spend their time learn­ing with MEL Kids sets will gain a firmer un­der­stand­ing of the world around them and find suc­cess in sci­ence and in life!

Vis­it the MEL Kids web­page to sub­scribe to month­ly MEL Kids sets.

¹Niko­laos Pel­las, Pana­gi­o­tis Fo­taris, Ioan­nis Kazani­dis, David Wells “Aug­ment­ing the learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion: a sys­tem­at­ic re­view of re­cent trends in aug­ment­ed re­al­i­ty game-based learn­ing”, Vir­tu­al Re­al­i­ty, De­cem­ber 2019, Vol­ume 23, Is­sue 4, pp 329–346

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