ARLectio: An Augmented Reality Platform to Support Teachers in

Producing Educational Resources

Mariella Farella, Marco Arrigo, Davide Taibi

, Giovanni Todaro, Giuseppe Chiazzese

and Giovanni Fulantelli

National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Education Technology, Via Ugo La Malfa 153, Palermo, Italy

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Education, Steam, Learning Model, Mobile Learning.

Abstract: In this article we present a learning platform named ‘ARLectio’ based on Augmented Reality (AR) technology

that aims at supporting teachers in promoting AR experience at school. The ARLectio platform has been

developed in the framework of the FabLab SchoolNet project, funded by the European Commission under

the Erasmus+ programme. With the use of Augmented Reality, Educational robotics and 3D printing, the

objective of the project is to develop a new learning model based on the design and implementation of

"objects" that can promote creativity and innovation, communication, collaboration, critical thinking and

computational thinking skills in students.

1 INTRODUCTION

Recent technological developments make modern

technologies such as Augmented Reality, Educational

Robotics and 3D printers particularly appealing for

school contexts, and easily integrated into teaching

activities. A common feature of these technologies is

their ability to activate learning-by-making

experiences based on the constructivist paradigm and

focused on the design and creation of tangible and

sharable "objects", where students become active

promoters of knowledge (Ferguson et al., 2019).

In this paper we introduce ARLectio, an

Augmented Reality educational platform designed to

support teachers and students in the production and

consuming of AR educational resources.

The ARLectio platform has been developed in the

framework of the FabLab SchoolNet project, funded

by the European Commission under the Erasmus+

programme. The objectives and structure of the

project will be described in the next section, together

with a review on the advances in AR research mainly

focusing on educational settings. In section 3, we will

introduce related work on AR tools specifically

designed for teachers and students in school settings,

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0785-6771

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0228-6204

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4098-8311

and highlight the innovative features introduced with

the ARLectio platform. In section 4, after a brief

presentation of the actions we have carried out within

the FabLab SchoolNet project to support teachers to

implement AR at school, we will describe the

ARLectio tool in details. Finally, some conclusions

are drawn.

2 THE FabLab SchoolNet

PROJECT AND AR IN

EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

The FabLab SchoolNet project is the result of a strong

transnational initiative and multidisciplinary

experience of partners from five European countries:

Lithuania, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. The

consortium is built on a strategic collaboration

between research institutions (National Research

Council, Institute for Educational Technologies,

Palermo, Italy), universities (University "Dunarea de

Jos" University of Galati, Romania), secondary

schools (Siauliu Didzdvario gimnazija, Siauliu,

Lithuania; 2 EPAL TRIKALON of Trikala, Greece;

Varnenska morska gimnazia "Sv. Nikolai

Farella, M., Arrigo, M., Taibi, D., Todaro, G., Chiazzese, G. and Fulantelli, G.

ARLectio: An Augmented Reality Platform to Support Teachers in Producing Educational Resources.

DOI: 10.5220/0009579104690475

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020) - Volume 2, pages 469-475

ISBN: 978-989-758-417-6

469

Chudotvorec" Varna, Bulgaria) and SMEs (FabLab

Palermo, Italy). The transnational approach allows

participants to deal with different cultures, thinking

and producing new ideas in a global market context.

The FabLab SchoolNet project intercepts an

Erasmus+ horizontal priority and two sectorial

priorities in the school education field. The horizontal

priority is related to the promotion of innovative and

open practices in the digital era through:

a) the learning materials that will be developed in

the project, available in open format,

b) the development of innovative approaches to

education, aimed at promoting effective use of the

technologies adopted in the project.

Amongst the sectoral priorities, the project

focuses on the problem of early school leaving (ESL)

and the promotion of the acquisition of new skills,

introducing a STEAM-based (Science, Technology,

Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) approach to

teaching. The project aims to develop and implement

a training program based on three modules addressing

the latest modern technologies and tools: educational

robotics, 3D printing and mobile technologies using

augmented reality (AR) applications. The modules

will be enriched with elements in the field of

Entrepreneurship Education, encouraging

participants (teachers, students, etc.) to develop new

ways of thinking and act dynamically in a global

market economy. In addition, the training program

includes a specific module on the integrated use of the

three technologies. The training program will be

finalized with various contests aimed at encouraging

participants to approach the real business

environment and acquire the ability to think and

develop models and ideas closely related to the real

market.

In education, Augmented Reality is one of the

emerging technologies, which has expanded in recent

years. The concept of Augmented Reality (AR) dates

back to the 1960s, when Ivan Sutherland developed

the first head-mounted display system (Sutherland,

1965), and is based on improving user’s perception

and interaction with the real world. As described by

Azuma (1997), Augmented Reality is a technology

that combines the real world and virtual images and

provides for simultaneous interaction between them.

Through Augmented Reality, users can add virtual

elements (textual information, images, videos or 3D

elements) to the surrounding environment by

displaying them in real time through the camera of the

device used, whether it is a mobile device, or a viewer

specifically designed for A.R. In recent years, various

studies (Sayed, Zayed, & Sharawy, 2011; Wu, Lee,

Chang, & Liang, 2013) have demonstrated the

potential of Augmented Reality in strengthening

students' motivation and making learning a more

engaging, stimulating and dynamic activity. In

addition, it can stimulate creativity, collaborative

skills and critical thinking in students.

AR applications can be found across many areas

of education, such as medicine, mathematics,

geometry, biology, history and further educational

fields. Salinas and González-Mendívil (2017)

integrate AR technology in mathematics education to

support the students to understand solids of revolution

and to improve spatial visualization skills. The

mobile system enables the interaction with the solids

of revolution making them tangible to the students,

and it promotes peer collaboration making students

work in pairs. In language learning, this technology

can be used to support the students on reading

comprehension and learning permanency (Godwin-

Jones, 2016). In fact, Bursali and Yilmaz (2019) show

that, by using augmented reality applications,

students perform better when compared to students

who read with traditional methods. In anatomy, Argo

et al. (2019) have developed an AR system that

allows the study of human organs in a simple way,

through the printing of a 3D model of a scanned organ

and a mobile device that visualizes all the information

related to the composition of the organ under

examination, simply by framing it with the camera. In

physics, AR can be used to demonstrate various

properties of kinematics, dynamically evaluating an

object that varies its speed and acceleration over time

(Lee, 2012); besides, it can be used to scan a picture-

marker and visualize a video of lecturer

demonstrating a laboratory installation, its basic

components and commenting on the experiment

procedure (Hruntova, Yechkalo, Striuk, & Pikilnyak,

2018). In history education Raghaw, Paulose and

Goswami (2018) have developed an AR system with

the intention to support students and helps the

community of tutors to make the class activities more

appealing; their proposal is based on videos related to

the historic lesson which are displayed on the mobile

devices when a the target image is scanned. .

Although the use of these technologies is rapidly

increasing and their usefulness in education has been

widely proved, not all schools are inclined to use

them. The main problems encountered by schools are

the lack of technological tools (both hardware and

software) and the lack of skills to use them, often

related to teachers’ resistance to adopting new

educational technologies. These difficulties are

amplified by specific factors; amongst the others:

 the cost of AR devices

 low usability of applications

CSEDU 2020 - 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

470

 poor quality of available content and use

cases

 lack of awareness of the benefits of

augmented reality in education.

Moreover, the hardware features of most of the

portable devices limit the use of this technology. In

fact, the use of AR applications on mobile devices

requires high computing power, sensors, cameras,

accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass, GPS.

The FabLab SchoolNet project aims to provide a

solution to these problems through the

implementation of innovative aspects:

 a syllabus about augmented reality,

educational robotics and 3d printing for

teachers

 a learning repository of educational resources

on the use of these technologies in

educational field

 a new tool, named ARLectio, to easily create

AR experiences at school.

3 RELATED WORK ON AR

TOOLS IN EDUCATION

There are several Augmented Reality applications for

teaching both for iOS and Android platforms. HP

Reveal (also known as Aurasma), until recently was

the most used and popular. It allowed teachers or

students to create or view AR experiences that

blended the physical and virtual worlds using a

mobile device's camera. This application was very

useful in education (Marcel, 2019) because it was

very easy to use and enabled the creation of

augmented contents, called Aura. It could be used, for

example, for the effective acquisition of geographical

knowledge in high schools (Bondarenko,

Pakhomova, & Zaselskiy, 2019), to provide

information to hearing impaired students wishing to

study Information Technology (Luangrungruang &

Kokaew, 2018), or to acquiring and retaining

mathematical knowledge in an informal learning

environment (Sommerauer & Müller, 2014).

According to the application portal, the HP Reveal

tool is no longer supported. Another example of AR

application in educational field is Google Expedition.

It is an immersive learning and teaching tool that lets

users go on VR trips or explore AR objects. Google

Expedition can enhance students' motivation to learn

and is particularly useful in STEM education

(Shapovalov, Bilyk, Atamas, & Shapovalov, 2018).

GeoGebra Augmented Reality is an educational

software that allows to place math objects on any

surface detected. In this application there are several

examples of 3D math objects that students can

analyze and use and, moreover, they can model new

objects (Lavicza, 2019). The Smartify application can

be used in museums and art galleries. It is an AR

application that allows users to scan artworks in order

not only to identify them but also to access instant art

commentary on own mobile device. In fact, this

system uses augmented reality and artificial

intelligence to help improve the wearer's experience

each time s/he visits the museum (Armfield, Hill Duin

& Pedersen, 2018). Curiscope is an AR application

designed for the study of human body; it allows to

scan a marker printed in a special t-shirt and see the

circulatory system, skeleton, muscles, and internal

organs (Fuchsova, Adamková, & Pirhacova

Lapsanska, 2019). Finally, a last example of

augmented reality is CoSpaces Edu. With this

application user can build their own 3D creations,

animate them with code and explore them in virtual

or augmented reality (Han, 2018). The main goal of

CoSpaces is to improve the critical thinking, the

collaboration, the creativity, the communication and

the digital literacy of the students.

This brief introduction on the state of the art of

tools to produce educational content using

Augmented Reality has highlighted the lack of

interesting, simple and fairly complete solutions

suitable for our needs. Consequently, we have

designed ARLectio, a tool that enables teachers to

easily create and exploit AR educational contents;

ARLectio will be usable on most of the mobile

devices and will be freely available for all teachers

interested in using AR solutions with their class. The

ARLectio tool will be described in the next section.

4 SUPPORTING TEACHERS TO

IMPLEMENT AR AT SCHOOL

Within the framework of the FabLabSchoolNet

project several actions have been carried out in order

to support the introduction of the Augmented Reality

learning topic in secondary school contexts.

In particular, these actions are logically organized

into the following phases:

 Defining a Learning Model

 Designing the evaluation strategy

 Developing a learning objects repository

 Designing the learning tools

ARLectio: An Augmented Reality Platform to Support Teachers in Producing Educational Resources

471

4.1 The Learning Model

The methodological approach for teaching with

innovative technologies adopted in the project is

based on the learning by making paradigm.

Specifically, a teaching methodology has been

defined with the aim of:

 supporting teachers in identifying the most

relevant activities that can be implemented

with the use of mobile devices, robotics and

3D technologies, to stimulate students’

creativity;

 guiding teachers in supporting learners during

all learning phases.

Moreover, in this phase the most appropriate tools

that can sustain the methodological approach have

also been identified.

The activities carried out during this phase of the

project will produce a teacher book including

guidelines to promote learning strategies based on the

technologies of FabLab Schoolnet.

4.2 The Evaluation Strategy

The second phase of the project consists in the design

of an assessment strategy aimed at evaluating the

learning model.

To this aim, a questionnaire related to the initial

students’ skills and competences in FabLab

SchoolNet technologies has been produced.

Specifically, it includes items to assess: the

familiarity of students with the general topics; their

knowledge of related technical terms such as

modelling, design, rapid prototyping; their attitude

towards business opportunities in applying the

FabLab SchoolNet technologies in real contexts. This

data has been gathered at the beginning and at the end

of the project activities, and the questionnaire will be

re-administered also and at the end of the activities

(pre- and post- tests), in order to measure the

knowledge acquired during the training programme.

This represents an important strategy to measure the

quality of the project and its impact on teachers and

students.

A TAM (Technology Acceptance Model)

questionnaire will be also submitted to the students.

TAM is considered a valid and robust model that can

be used to explain potential users’ intention to adopt

a technological artifact (Almenara, Andez-Batanero,

& Osuna, 2019). In the framework of the project, the

TAM questionnaire will be used to predict teachers’

and students’ behavior with the project technologies

a function of their intention and attitude to use

Figure 1: Educational resources list.

them. In particular, the TAM questionnaire will be

used to measure the following dimensions:

 Perceived usefulness

 Perceived ease of use

 Perceived enjoyment

 Intention to use

 Personal innovativeness

On January 2020 a pilot has been started in the

schools of the partnership, using the three

technologies during STEAM lessons. At the end of

the pilot, a report on the results of the evaluation

phase will be elaborated and published, in order to

inform the scientific community.

4.3 The Learning Objects Repository

A learning objects repository is designed to store,

organize and share all the learning modules and

materials developed during the project activities.

An initial set of learning modules that leverages

mobile, robotics and 3D technologies has been

created.

On this platform the output created by students

during the pilot course in Greece and the cascading

courses in Lithuania and Bulgaria will be collected

and shared.

The learning materials collected into the

repository will be described through metadata to

improve their searchability; furthermore, a rating

system will be implemented to activate an internal

quality assurance mechanism.

Materials and courses will be released as Open

Educational Resources.

CSEDU 2020 - 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

472

Figure 2: Create a new AR educational resource.

4.4 The Learning Tools – The

ARLectio Platform

As introduced above, a tool for the creation and

exploitation of AR educational content has been

designed and developed. The main aim of this tool is

to provide an easier way to produce and consume AR

educational resources. Moreover, the idea is to

provide a simple user interface to facilitate the human

interaction with the mobile system. This system

allows users to implement AR education contents on

most media channels (images, video, text and 3D

model). ARLectio is composed of a server part, a web

application addressed to teachers, for the creation of

educational contents implementing by AR

technology, and a client-side mobile App, for

students, to consume the AR educational resources.

By accessing the web application each teacher can

provide a list of students to be involved and can create

the AR educational resources. Teacher can create,

edit delete and organize the resources by managing

these main fields: subject, title, description, marker

(photos, picture or QRCode), augmentation type

(text, image, video, 3D model), augmentation,

position.

The mobile application has been developed for

students who need to login in order to access the

educational AR resource created by their teachers.

Resources are grouped by subject and an interactive

visual scanner is available to consume the educational

contents associated to markers.

In particular, the web platform is accessible from

the FabLab SchoolNet project website: https://

www.fablabschoolnet.eu/en/login.html.

Figure 3: ARLectio mobile App.

After logging, the teacher will be able to view their

resources (Figure 1), edit them and add new ones

(Figure 2). The web platform is designed to be easy

to use and to manage content easily. In order to create

a resource, the teacher must select the category in

which he/she wants to insert it, which corresponds to

the name of the subject (ICT, Mathematics,

Geography and other school subject), and enter a title

and a description of the resource. Then, teacher can

choose the marker.

This application is marker-based, so by focusing

the device camera on the specified marker, such as an

image or QRCode, the application is able to retrieve

the information stored to display the augmentation

object accurately.

After the marker has been added, the teacher can

choose the type of augmented content to add: text,

video, image or 3D model. The position of the

augmented resource can be chosen from the nine

options on the list (Top Left, Top Center, Top Right,

Middle Left, Middle Center, Middle Right, Bottom

Left, Bottom Center, Bottom Right). In fact, the

marker is considered as if it were a 3x3 matrix, and

each box in the matrix correspond to one position

(Figure 3). So, for example, the teacher can choose to

add the content at the top right or bottom centre or

choose to have the content overlaid on the marker

choosing the middle center position and selecting the

fill attribute.

When the resource is saved, it is stored on a server

and can be used by the AR mobile application. To

develop the Augmented Reality mobile application,

ARLectio: An Augmented Reality Platform to Support Teachers in Producing Educational Resources

473

we first tried to understand the target device on which

the application would be used. Our goal was to make

the application usable on most possible devices that

are not necessarily of the latest generation. In fact,

there are lots of augmented reality development kits,

so the choice wasn't that easy. We have analyzed the

main features of framework such as ARKit, ARCore,

Vuforia, EasyAR and Kudan and their device

requirements and pricing and license key pricing.

Since teachers and students do not always have high

quality devices, we chose to use the Kudan

framework, a free framework that works on both iOS

and Android devices even with older operating

system versions. Kudan framework

(https://www.xlsoft.com/en/products/kudan/ar-

sdk.html) can recognize 2D and 3D images and it

relies on the use of natural features like the edges,

corners, or textures of the chosen marker.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The ARLectio platform presented in this paper aims

to contribute to help teachers to produce educational

contents for their students and, more generally, to

adopt new Augmented Reality technologies as a

methodology to promote knowledge acquisition. The

idea has been developed within the FabLab

SchoolNet project, a project funded by the European

Commission, with the general aim to provide teachers

with innovative, easy to use and free IT tools that can

support them in their teaching activities. Firstly, we

have introduced the state of the art about AR tools

available in the market, with special focus on those

that can support teachers and students in educational

settings. The results of this analysis have highlighted

the scarcity of free and easy to use tools for the

creation and exploitation of AR educational contents;

consequently, we have designed and developed

ARLectio, a free of charge client-server platform that

will be made available to the teachers’ community.

Specifically, ARLectio provides teachers with tools

to create educational contents based on AR

technologies; furthermore, an ARLectio app allows

students to access the AR educational resources

through their own mobile devices. By means of the

tools developed in the framework of the FabLab

SchoolNet project, school teachers will have the

possibilities to develop AR educational resources

with their classes, and activate exciting learning by

making strategies. The system has been introduced to

all teachers of the FabLab SchoolNet network at the

end of 2019 in the Staff Training Event held in

Palermo (Italy) from 25

to 29

of November in an

intensive teacher training meeting. On that occasion,

ARLectio has been used by a group of 15 teachers to

develop AR educational materials and the realization

of learning units for high school. Teachers have

widely appreciated the ease of use of the system as

well as its versatility. In the following months a pilot

has been started in the schools of the partnership,

using the system also for the production of

educational content to be offered to students in the

classroom. At the end of the pilot phase, a wide test

phase with school groups was supposed to start but

the advent of COVID-19 emergency has interrupted

the didactic activities, and therefore the

experimentation activities. Nevertheless, the

preliminary analysis of the feedback coming from

first pilot phase has been used to improve the system;

by taking into account that the system is still in pre-

testing phase, the new iOS and Android versions of

the software have been directly delivered to all the

teachers involved in the pilot, by using the iOS Apple

TestFlight platform, and a direct private download

repository for Android devices. Finally, the current

and future developments of ARLectio include new

features for the production of interactive AR

educational content as well as features for the timely

management of the class group by teachers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been developed in the framework of

the Erasmus+ Key action Cooperation for innovation

and the exchange of good practices, Strategic

Partnerships for school education, project: “FabLab

SchoolNet: STEAM education and learning by

Robotics, 3D and Mobile technologies”, reference

number No 2018-1-LT01-KA201-047064.

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