On the 28th of August 2013 I defended my graduation project:
Developing an Augmented Reality application to promote an extended concept of cognition in education
[ABSTRACT]
The ever decreasing size and price of computer parts seems to be leading to computing power becoming ubiquitous. Similar to technology such as pen and paper, computing power becomes intertwined with our problem solving processes in such ways that it becomes invisible. This development has, and will have, enormous influence on our cognitive profiles. The field of education however, has barely changed to cope with this change in cognitive profiles. While developments in information technologies are changing how we learn in many ways, we believe it is essential to rethink what we should learn in this perspective of increasing availability and accessibility of computing power.
This research reviews an extended concept of cognition, in which technological elements can actually be part of the cognitive process. We suggest this view as a framework to discuss the goals of education and the technological aids that can be used to reach these goals. To raise this discussion, a mobile application is developed which shows the potential of Augmented Reality techniques to display context-sensitive information, which can be incorporated in the problem solving process.
The output of my research project consisted of three parts:
1. An article published in the third issue of AR[t] magazine of the ARLab titled: ‘Augmented Education: How AR technologies extend our minds’.
2. An Augmented Reality app ARMath, created using Unity 3D and the Vuforia AR library. The prototype recognizes mathematical statements and displays extra information on the problem in the vicinity, such as a graph when an equation is recognized. Because of the limitations of live text recognition, this prototype uses image recognition and therefore only works for certain mathematical statements.
3. A PhD proposal to extend this research.
My project was graded a 8,5.
