How to Use Augmented Reality to Gamify Learning
Featuring Jaime Donally, Instructional Strategist, and Renee Dawson, Educational Special Technology Specialist
We recently sat down with Jaime Donally, Instructional Strategist and expert on AR/VR in education, and Renee Dawson, an Educational Special Technology Specialist for Atlanta Public Schools, to talk about integrating Augmented Reality (AR) into lessons to complement core curriculum. In the second of this three-part series, Jaime and Renee discussed how augmented reality can gamify your lessons, making them engaging and impactful.
For a quick refresher on what augmented reality is and how it can be used in education, see:
What is McGraw Hill AR?
McGraw Hill AR is a free augmented reality app we created in partnership with Verizon for its Verizon Innovative Learning initiative, which seeks to bridge the digital divide by providing digital skills training to 10 million students by 2030. The app supplements any core curriculum by providing hands-on experiences on challenging, abstract, or “routine” topics to engage students and open up new opportunities for learning. These bite-sized, standards-aligned experiences give teachers flexibility in integration while helping students learn a concept in minutes. The app library currently includes science, social studies, and math. McGraw Hill AR is available for tablets and smartphones, but some web-based activities are available on mharonline.com.
By the start of the 2024 back-to-school season, all activities will be available in Spanish and for web. Over the next few years, our team will be creating dozens more activities branching into new subject areas — so stay tuned!
Every activity in McGraw Hill AR follows an Observe, Explore, Evaluate approach:
- Observe: Students watch a narrated animation to preview what they’re going to learn.
- Explore: Students interact with 3-D objects and scenarios, exploring possibilities and manipulating outcomes.
- Evaluate: Students apply knowledge via interactive quiz questions.
Download McGraw Hill AR on your phone here:
How Augmented Reality Can Gamify Learning
When designed with modern classrooms and student preferences in mind, AR tools can be a natural fit for game-based learning experiences. Our content specialists created the activities in McGraw Hill AR with playfulness, collaboration, and imagination in mind.
Creating Room for Failure
We know from brain science that failure is a necessary and deeply valuable part of the learning process. In the Explore phase of a McGraw Hill AR activity, students are given an interactive, flexible playground environment in which failure is an option that helps them learn more about the concept. In many of the activities, failure can even be fun.
For example, in our slope activity, students adjust the rise and run of a mountain or ramp to help skiers and skateboarders up and down a slope using math. When they’re wrong, the skier crashes — try that activity with students and see if the crash isn’t as fun as a successful jump!
Brain science also tells us that fostering a growth mindset is critical in math. By encouraging failure and celebrating success, AR gives students an engaging, safe space to be curious and challenge themselves to grow.
Making the Impossible, Possible
Augmented reality games present the unique opportunity to fail — and fail again, or experiment, test, and explore — at tasks where failure is normally not an option. Our content specialists carefully gamified concepts like the human circulatory system to give students an engaging, 3-D look at the human body while playing a matching game.
AR also allows for the gamification of historical concepts. When our content specialists set out to design an activity around trench warfare in World War I, they wanted students to grasp important concepts about war while also grappling with the realities of its impact. In the activity, students use war strategies (such as artillery bombardment, infantry charge, and creeping barrage) to advance their side’s men across the no man’s land. While students will get better results when they employ strategies correctly, they’ll find that they never truly “win,” driving home the understanding that trench warfare changed war and resulted in unprecedented causalities. Gamification and AR allow students to engage with a complex topic far removed from their own experiences.
Collaborating, Competing, and Perspective-Taking
McGraw Hill AR activities use gamification for social learning, such as collaboration and perspective-taking. Using shared or individual devices, students can form small groups to complete the Explore portion of the activity, discussing what they observed and even competing in the gamified elements of the activities.
Gamified AR can also be designed to promote unique opportunities for perspective-taking. In the Industrial Revolution activity, students take on the role of assembly workers at Henry Ford’s automobile factory in 1925. If they don’t keep up the pace installing tires on cars on the line, they’re fired! The game — both fun and a bit frustrating — conveys the stressful environment and pressures of Industrial Revolution workers.
To learn more about McGraw Hill AR, click here. To watch a recording of this conversation, click here.
For more on play and gamification in learning, see:
