James Carter

Developing on my Initial idea I chose this topic because I wanted to work on something that I could actually have seen myself or others using back when I had books like this. In fact After a bit of research into the topic it was clear that studies supported the use of AR technology in Learning, where  “Numerous studies have indicated that AR promotes enhanced learning performance.” (2. M Akçayır and G Akçayır) So despite my topic not necessarily being very academic, it is intended to highlight that the use of this technology in education of people especially those with learning difficulties who may struggle via traditional means is the way to go moving forward and should not be ignored. So from an accessibility standpoint the use of technology like this in the educational space could be invaluable, creating interactive elements that help the student retain information by presenting it in a visually interesting format. Unfortunately “Despite a significant volume of empirical research suggesting that augmented reality has a positive impact on student learning outcomes, it has not been widely adopted within education.” (3. Lima et al.) meaning at the minute the technology is not being used to its potential, so as I move on with this project I aim to demonstrate how visually interesting or interactive elements can vastly increase engagement in learning new things quicker than the original.

The first step in the journey of creating this project had to be finding the pages I would use to create my AR project from. Initially My plan was to create these pages myself however after spending some time discussing my project with my peers I realised the main focus of the Project isn’t’ necessarily the content itself but more the AR Element and my use of the technology in the creation of the project. So I went about finding a good resource to pull from in order to find the perfect pages to work on. In the end I decided to go for the redstone handbook,  the reason behind this decision is routed in my personal experience with these books as a child however it can be argued the books used most by the people that actually played the game would most benefit from this upgrade with the help of AR Technology especially since redstone is considered one of the more difficult areas of the game to master for new players. After finding the online book I went about selecting some of the key pages which teach the basics of redstone in the game to turn into AR elements, the idea being that new players struggling to understand purely based on pictures in the book could activate the AR and witness the Block or blocks working in 3D as they would in the game making it much easier to understand and put into practice when actually playing. Once again this could greatly help children with learning difficulties to feel included and just as able as other kids which is how education should be, accessible to everyone.