Empowering teachers to create augmented reality experiences: the effects on the educational experience

Well-designed educational Augmented Reality (AR) experiences support collaboration, transferability to the real world, situated, and experiential learning. Nevertheless, envisioning engaging yet effective learning and teaching experiences is a challenge. Most teachers are not technologically ready to create AR experiences and rely upon closed products often regarded as fun activities but whose learning affordances might remain unnoticed and whose integration within the course activities is often shoehorned. End-User Development tools empowering not technical users like teachers to create their own AR experience could contribute to spread the use of this technology in educational settings. In this paper, we analyze whether a EUD AR tool based on mobile technology can have positive effects on the educational experience from a teaching and learning perspective. We performed qualitative and quantitative research in a high school analyzing the tool in a focus group with teachers and assessing its effects on the educational experience by using it in two real classes. Results show that even if using the tool implies an additional workload for teachers, results can be rewarding for both, teachers and students that are skilled enough to use AR as far as it is based on easy, familiar, and affordable devices like mobile devices.