MOBILE LEARNING IN THE SCIENCES: TRANSFORMING FIELD TRIPS WITH VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY (Invited Presentation)

Students in higher education are often forced to learn abstract decontextualized facts. In the geosciences, this type of learning is ameliorated by field trips that provide some meaning and context to difficult concepts. However, with the educational technologies available today, science educators can offer their learners so much more. The majority of adults in the world own more than one mobile device (Statista, 2016). The largest mobile device users are 18-29 (Pew, 2017; Poushter, 2016) which is the typical age of college students. Students are often connected to their mobile phones and tablets and with a few simple free websites and applications, these devices can be on for a real purpose in the science classroom.

In this session, the presenter will demonstrate how mobile devices can be used to greatly enhance field trips. For real-world field trips, instructors can use augmented reality to build on the Pokémon Go approach to bring students out of their technology bubble to embrace the real-world with the technology seamlessly integrated. For locations previously inaccessible, students can take virtual field trips to contextualize the learning.

Poushter, J. (2016). Smartphone ownership and Internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies. Retrieved January 2017 from http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/02/22/smartphone-ownership-and-internet-usage-continues-to-climb-in-emerging-economies/

Pew. (2017). Mobile fact sheet. Retrieved January, 2017 from Pew Research Center http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/

Statista. (2016). Share of mobile device owners worldwide from 2011 to 2016, by number of devices owned. Retrieved January, 2017 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/245501/multiple-mobile-device-ownership-worldwide/