Augmented Reality: Examining its value in a music technology classroom. Practice and potential.

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) provides exciting opportunities for advancing the design and practice of classroom instruction. AR can facilitate unique opportunities for students to conceptualise, understand and recall learning content. AR offers students contextual learning experiences. These views suggest that AR can assist in reducing distances between learner’s knowledge and what they need to understand. In my senior music classroom, I tested these ideas, wanting to see if students, through using AR, could visualise relationships between component parts, describe their function and use that knowledge in practice. The focus centred on students need to construct a sound system for performance in a Year 12 music class (16–17 years old). The project question was; Would AR aid the understanding and conceptualisation of content and develop the quality and retention of their learning? Through observation, interviews and a questionnaire, I used these data to understand levels of knowledge retention, conceptualisation and understanding of content. Findings indicate that while students displayed content conceptualisation skills, they also showed secure knowledge retention in line with previous studies. An encouraging finding suggests that in using AR, students retained what they had learned, remembering the function and use of various components after one learning experience. The potential impact of new and emerging technologies such as AR on student progress and instructional design is exciting, offering alternative ways of delivering and mediating learning content and concepts that connect with teaching and learning.

Keywords

Augmented reality; music technology; contextual learning; knowledge retention.