A Review on Augmented Reality Authoring Toolkits for Education

Abstract

Creating pedagogically sound, interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences supporting situated and experiential learning remains a challenge to teachers without programming skills. To integrate AR in the everyday classroom, teachers need to be capable of designing their own immersive experiences for their students, which is why an analysis of existing authoring toolkits is necessary to identify suitable tools for educational application development and future research directions in terms of educational AR. We identified “easy access”, “GUI-based design”, and “interactive contents” as needs of teachers for designing AR content for the classroom. Based on these needs, we conducted a literature review of 835 documents. Of 80 relevant articles, we included 43 peer-reviewed articles from ACM Digital Library, DBLP, IEEExplore, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and miscellaneous other sources in our analysis. We identified 69 different AR authoring toolkits and classified these with regard to their accessibility, their degree of required programming knowledge, and their interactivity. The results show a divergent research landscape with a lack of empirical evaluation. Of 26 openly accessible toolkits, we identified five toolkits addressing the defined needs of teachers for designing interactive AR experiences for the classroom without requiring extensive programming knowledge. We conclude that there are only few tools for the straightforward design of educational AR experiences addressing the needs of teachers and suggest using research-informed and evidence-based criteria for developing AR authoring toolkits for education.

A survey of field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based graph convolutional neural network accelerators: challenges and opportunities

“…Then, we make the second-round search. After it, we used Google Scholar to scan the references, cited in these articles with the snowballing approach ( Dengel et al, 2022 ). It is worthwhile to mention that we focused on the FPGA-based designs published in the top FPGA conferences (FPGA, FCCM, FPL, FPT), EDA conferences (DAC, ASP-DAC, DATE, ICCAD), and architecture conferences (MICRO, HPCA, ISCA, ASPLOS) since 2019 ( Guo et al, 2019 ).…”

A Design Space of Educational Authoring Tools for Augmented Reality

“…Augmented Reality (AR) is now used by thousands of users for formal and non-formal learning and training [5]. Because AR offers an immersive medium for representing and interacting with content [14], it is increasingly put forward to support active and experiential learning in many disciplines, including art, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine [9,2].…”

“…However, recent reviews have underlined that creating AR experiences that fit pedagogical needs remains a salient challenge because of (i) the complexity of authoring AR and (ii) lacks of evidence-based methods to integrating AR in everyday classrooms [1,5,16]. Currently, authoring AR experiences requires significant technical knowledge and skills [12].…”

“…First, it is only accessible to a small group of people with advanced programming skills. Second, toolkits have limited "built-in" support for helping teachers use AR to its full pedagogical capacities [5,6]. Such limitations make it harder for teachers to harness this new learning medium for their everyday classrooms.…”

“…There are significant differences between existing tools, which make it difficult for researchers and designers to grasp a holistic view of the rapidly-growing AR authoring research and practice. The few studies that have analyzed authoring tools [12,11,5] focused mostly on (i) technical aspects and (ii) tools that require programming (i.e, toolkits), (iii) including non-educational tools. Therefore, we still lack a characterization of existing educational AR authoring tools that do not require programming.…”