Guidelines for Teacher Training in Mobile Augmented Reality Games: Hearing the Teachers’ Voices

Lúcia Pombo,Margarida M Marques

doi:10.3390/educsci11100597

Abstract

Mobile augmented reality games (MARGs) can be leveraged for educational purposes, as there are several examples in the literature revealing their educational value. The supporting technologies for MARGs’ implementation in education are increasingly pervasive and popular, so it is time for their adoption in teacher practices. However, the integration of new practices in schools, with an impact on students’ learning, requires teacher training. For that, a 50 h workshop was con-ducted to promote the collaborative development of MARGs for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning, which was attended by 16 in-service teachers, in Portugal. The aim of this study is to propose a set of guidelines for teacher training on MARGs, emergent from the perspectives of teachers who participated in the workshop. This is a descriptive qualitative study focusing on documental analysis of the individual final reflections of the participating teachers. The results showed that the workshop answered teachers’ personal and professional needs, with an impact on their practices, in what concerns the integration of mobile and AR technology, and of games. Producing a new game during training and making it freely available for others to use seemed to be very satisfactory for teachers, and a good practice to follow. From teachers’ reflections, it was possible to propose a set of guidelines useful for international readership, both researchers and teacher trainers, who aim to conceive and develop continuous professional development initiatives for MARGs’ integration in teacher practices.

Highlights

Mobile augmented reality games (MARGs) are games supported by mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, that incorporate the presentation of interactive virtual content, such as texts, 2D or 3D graphics, audio, or even video, accurately overlaid on a real-time camera feed of the real-world environment [1]
MARGs can be leveraged for educational purposes, as there are several examples in the literature revealing their educational value [2,3,4]
It is classified as a descriptive qualitative study, one of the most common research designs in the field of Education [21], and it is guided by the following research question: How was the training process of this workshop, which targets MARGs’ integration into teacher practices, according to the teacher trainees?

Summary

Introduction

MARGs can be leveraged for educational purposes, as there are several examples in the literature revealing their educational value [2,3,4]. Among their benefits, the literature has been pointing to increased engagement and motivation for learning [2,5,6] as well as students’ enhanced understanding of scientific models [7] and of complex concepts that are difficult to understand with traditional textbooks [8]. The authors of [9]

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Results