Author(s):
The goal of this project is to fundamentally improve how undergraduate biological science students engage with molecular-scale phenomena. A key challenge to students’ conceptualization of molecular phenomenal is that they occur in three-dimensional (3D) space but are often presented in static two dimensional forms, and they occur on a scale that is unfamiliar and starkly different from the scale of everyday human experience. Networked augmented reality (AR) technologies can make the invisible visible, enhance student understanding of complex 3D phenomena, allow multiple users to view and control a shared 3D simulation from multiple points of view, and provide a real-time link between changes in specific parameters of a system and changes in the corresponding physical processes and quantitative representations. Our vision is to harness those advantages and couple them with a social environment in which each student in a group is assigned a unique role and individualized access to relevant information to ensure that they must collaborate in their exploration of molecular-scale phenomena. Through a series of scaffolded lessons, groups of students engage in meaning-making through discourse centered on shared experiences in the AR environment, with each student taking an active role in collecting data and developing explanatory models based on observations. This approach provides students a socially mediated AR (SoAR) environment where they can collaboratively develop their conceptual and quantitative understanding of molecular phenomena.
Coauthors
jprathe2@uwyo.edu
