Mechatronics lab

Hau-yu Chu and Daniella DiLacqua

Our team has begun our research phase to get an overview of current augmented reality (AR) technologies and their use in education. We kept a shared Google document to open lines of communication about the research papers we read. We have discovered that many applications of AR use position-based sensing to call up useful information for a user. This has been demonstrated in a museum setting in China. Other AR projects use marker and markerless applications for education, gaming, and even advertisements. AR can be used to enhance a textbook by bringing up a 3D image. Some studies attempted to quantify the impact of AR vs traditional teaching methods on students. Others were more concerned with acknowledging increased motivation on tech native students. Additionally, we spend some time getting more familiar with hardware and software components that we will need knowledge of as we move forward with our projects. Hau-yu even brought in her personal supply of Littlebits. We spent some time going through Arduino tutorials and noting the differences between the Arduino and Basic Stamp 2 syntax. We compared and contrasted the benefits of codebender, Android Studio, and MIT AppInventor2. Daniella has begun creating basic apps with AppInventor2. We look forward to using this knowledge to help graduate students Jared and Anthony improve their projects.