Thank you for visiting our “AR-Classroom” in the 2022 STEM for All Video Showcase!

The mathematics describing spatial transformations can be very difficult for college students. While moving something in the physical world may be easy to understand, describing the same operation with math in the digital world can be daunting. Our project AR-Classroom is developing new technology using Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the teaching and learning of these difficult concepts in STEM, e.g., 3D rotation sequences: Yaw, Roll, and Pitch, and their math representations: Axis-Angle, Euler Angles, Matrices, and Quaternions.
This NSF- and Texas A&M University-funded project, which is in its early stage with developed AR Apps and promising pilot study results, aims to create novel learning tools and advance knowledge across disciplines of spatial and mathematical pedagogies, by exploring:
      1. the role of AR to allow the interplay between physical and virtual manipulatives (using LEGO® as examples!) to engage students in embodied learning
      2. the capabilities of AR to make difficult invisible concepts visible for supporting an intuitive and formal understanding of spatial reasoning and mathematical formulation
      3. the features of AR that help students see relationships between spatial manipulations and mathematical operations

Your comments, questions, and advice will be greatly appreciated!

Project AR-Classroom Team
Texas A&M University
https://sites.google.com/tamu.edu/ar-classroom
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2119549

What a great way to make linear transformations more dynamic and tangible! I was curious, in what ways do you envision your AR materials could be incorporated into a math classroom? Thank you in advance for any insights your team is willing to share!

This project is so cool.

In biochemistry and molecular biology, there are some concepts that benefit from understanding spatial arrangements and relationships. Have you considered expanding these ideas to something like this? Would love to talk about this idea more if it makes sense!

Hi team--thanks for sharing this video! The use of AR to support this kind of STEM learning is a nice application to see. I was curious, do you have particular hypotheses about which kinds of STEM/engineering concepts will be most amenable to augmented reality transformations? In the example you showed, do the students create their own Lego pieces to use in the activity? It's a great way to add on the layer of AR onto Legos, which are already a good manipulable for learning spatial skills! 

Loved hearing about this work. It's also great to see the ways that this work is improving student learning. I'm wondering if you have had any chance to disaggregate the data and see if the improvements are across the board, or if there are certain students based on race, major, gender identity, etc., that experience particularly large improvements in performance.

Thanks Marcelo for your interest in this project. That’s a great question indeed. Our user study (after the pilot study mentioned in the video), conducted on 59 undergraduate students, revealed that students in STEM fields had better improvement in their math test compared to their peers in other fields. The difference between gender was negligible. However, our observations and students’ answers of subjective questionnaires showed that even students of non-STEM were very interested in playing with the app and thought that the visual graphics helped them understand the concepts.

The project’s broader impact aims to support many students who struggle with spatial and math reasoning, especially those from underrepresented groups in STEM. Gaining a fundamental understanding of spatial transformations can uniquely contribute to students’ learning and development of spatial reasoning and allied mathematical skills, leading to improved STEM studies.

It is interesting that their math improved but not as much their spatial skills. How many of your students came in with poor spatial skills (i.e., <21 on the PSVT:R)? Research shows that low spatial skills result in lower retention and GPAs in STEM majors. Do you think if you worked to improve student's spatial skills (for the low performing students) that their math skills would improve? Did you see a correlation between their math skills and spatial skills? You should check out my video about the work we are doing in teaching spatial and sketching skills. Love your research.

Great video and tool. I'm curious about embodied learning. Do you think the size of the models impacts that? Students are making small movements with their fingers, hands, and arms. Maybe that's enough, but I wonder if they were moving their whole bodies through larger spaces if that would have any impact on their learning.

As a learning game designer, I see great potential in your tool to be playful, solving spatial puzzles in a game world using the transformations you're trying to teach. Have you considered that direction? I'm actually working on an AR learning game now for learning geometric transformations at the middle/high school level. Maybe we can compare notes sometime.

How big were the learning gains you saw? Did that match your expectations? Any surprises?

Thanks Dan for your comment! You alluded to a very valid point. Embodied learning may better help students with whole-body movement. Please also see our second prototype (watch) where we have intended to integrate more embodied learning while playing. Let us know what you think! 
Solving spatial puzzles in a gaming environment is a very interesting idea that our app could help! Thanks for sharing! I would love to discuss with you more about our research and findings! 
Later in our user study (after the pilot study mentioned in the video), conducted on 59 students, we found significant learning gain (p<0.05) on students' math skills, specifically on transformation matrices! Still, their PVRT (Purdue Visualization of Rotation Test) score did not improve significantly after the workshop (20-40 minutes of playing with the app).
However, we still are researching what specific features of AR helped students in the significant learning gain or whether graphical representations were the major contributor rather than AR environment. 

Very interesting research. Thank you for sharing this information. I can see many useful applications of this program for learning mathematics. I look forward to learning more about your project. 

Thanks Leanne for your interest! You can follow some of our projects here: BRICKxAR

This is such a cool project. I love that you used LEGOs. I feel like this could also be applied to geology. It would be awesome to have a structural geology class that incorporated this AR and VR program in relation to how rocks fold and break, especially since a lot of what you have to go off of is not visible on the surface. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your project!