Hacking Assessments with AR: a podcast interview

One of my students (Ben) and I recently chatted with David Hotler (@dhotler) about the extraordinary work Ben is doing in his independent study as a member of our student help desk team. Our conversation was a follow up to a blog post I wrote about Ben's exploration of virtual reality and his application of his learning to his classroom assessment.

You can listen to the edtechteam podcast via David's blog. Updates on Ben's work will be on-going. He has completed his math project in Metaverse and below is a video in which he reflects on what he learned:

Ben is now in the planning stages for an English project. After that he plans to tackle to periodic table. Stay tuned... more soon! 

Hacking Assessments with Augmented Reality

In my new role I am overseeing the students enrolled in our help desk course. I am in the process of invigorating a program that has been languishing. To do this, the I returned to the core of what the program is supposed to be or supposed to accomplish: independent learning by students and service to the community. Each student has identified a problem, of sorts, that they want to solve, they are working through design thinking protocols to develop and prototype solutions as well as identifying areas of new learning for themselves in order to implement the solution.

Two students have partnered to help revamp our freshmen orientation and new student transition programs by creating a 3D virtual tour of our school.

One student is investigating high levels of stress in shelter animals and plans to use our makerspace to create toys and other tools for donating to local shelters.

Another student is responding to teacher frustrations with our current program for reporting grades by building a grade book as a Google add-on.

Yet another student is hacking assessment.

He decided that the problem he experiences impacts his classmates as well, and that is, lack of choice in assessments. From his perspective, students are assigned to do the same thing in all of their classes. No variety and little choice. So he is learning augmented reality tools to systematically hack assessments that are assigned to him. His goal is to apply an AR hack to one assessment in each discipline over the course of the semester.

He has started by using Metaverse to create a guide to solving a complex math problem. He is anticipating all of the errors a student could make while solving the problem and using his AR tour to provide hints and redirection. This is the student explain his progress so far, obstacles he has encountered, and how he is getting around them.

He is still doing all of the work that is assigned to him. He is using the one period each day during which he is assigned to help desk, to show the same learning his teachers expect in a different (and personalized) way. When he is done, he will share both products with his teacher: the assigned one, and the hack. Once he has completed two or three of them, we plan to offer an "Appy Hour" seminar for faculty to learn from him about his projects and what he is learning along the way.

To that end, he is regularly sharing with me his metacognitive moments along the way. Here he is sharing his reflection about learning while working on his math problem:

Why Merge Cubes are only $1 at Walmart

Back in October educators in different communities to which I belong were posting about Merge Cubes and how cool they are. And they were cheap - only $15. If you bought the headset then they pushing the $85 range, but you could have a cool augmented reality (AR) experience without it. And I kept thinking about getting one, even thought about giving them as gifts at the holidays, but for some reason I didn't.

Then, Tuesday morning my Facebook feed was full of people saying "Merge Cubes at Walmart for $1!" And by lunch time I had ten of them. Today I brought two of them to the library and played with one for a bit only to find that my Samsung phone is not entirely compatible with it. So I handed the Cube to a student who is in my help desk course and asked him to play with it for a bit.

First, a bit about the student. His semester-long project is focused on practicing and modeling project-based assessment techniques, particularly ones that involve technological applications, that could be used across the disciplines. He is hoping to model for both his teachers and his peers ways in which students can demonstrate learning and growth in ways that aren't commonly used at the school. In short, and closer to his words, he wants to make doing projects fun and interesting while convincing people he has learned something. And, he is starting with AR.

Back to the Cube. He played with it for about 30 minutes, said "Thanks! That was fun." and went to his next class. A couple of hours later he came back and brought a friend. He said, "I was hoping I could show him that Cube." I handed them two cubes and got out of the way.

In the span of 45 minutes here is what happened:

1) The two students were joined by four more. And this was a group of average students, a little bit techy, into games, fairly studious, athletic, well-liked and respected.

2) They installed a dozen games on their phones (mostly iPhones).

3) They played and laughed a lot and loudly.

4) They figured out how to share a game code and play together.

5) They didn't care when I brought teachers over to watch them play. And they didn't care when the teachers were a bit disinterested and walked away.

6) One of them took a picture of one of the triggers and turned his phone to another student. That student scanned the image of the trigger and launched a game. And they all stopped playing.

7) They gathered around the table and took pictures of all the sides of the cube. They loaded the pictures into a Google doc, printed it, and folded the sides into a paper cube.

8) They scanned it and it worked.

9) They rejoiced.

10) They hypothesized.

11) They went back to the Google doc, enlarged one of the triggers, printed it, scanned it and launched a game. Their hypothesis was proven true: the larger trigger rendered a larger AR experience.

12) They planned: "If we take one trigger, cut it into smaller pieces, enlarge all the pieces on the copier, and reassemble it, then we can lay it on the floor and take a tablet to the second floor and scan it from there for a massive display!"

Who knows if that will work. But, the last comment one of them made was:

13) Let's make our own game.

I sent them home to learn Metaverse.

A side note: I hesitated writing this blog post because these students entirely hacked a commercial product. They exploited it for its full potential and then owned it. And there may be some copyright violations in there somewhere. But I decided to write this anyway, because OMG: they exploited it for its full potential and then owned it, in forty-five minutes. And it was so cool to watch. And if you notice in the numbered steps above: they played, collaborated, planned, inquired, theorized, tested, reassessed, prototyped, and had fun while doing it. It was a great way to end the day!

Lessons learned from experimenting with VR

We are investigating different ways to use augmented and virtual reality to enhance teaching and learning. At this point our approach may be a bit haphazard as we play with different free devices, apps, and triggers in our pursuit of a full curricular adoption of a VR platform. Such adoption is a long way off. In the meantime we are gaining increasing appreciation for the learning potential of a robust system as we watch our students interact with the modest tools in our makerspace.

A tool we have: a class set of cardboards
The obstacle we face: no devices to insert into the cardboards

Another tool: In addition to their BYOD devices, students bring smartphones to school
Another obstacle: our state has a student data privacy law that significantly restricts the digital platforms to which teachers can direct students for classroom exercises.

So here is what we have tried:

Having recently upgraded my phone, I donated my old android phone to our TechXperts. I showed them the roller coaster cardboard app and then got out of the way. They started by creating elastic head straps to turn the cardboards into hands-free devices. They scoured the play store for VR experiences compatible with the single device we have and began wandering the makerspace wearing the headset. Students started clambering: me, too! me, too! and the line formed of students waiting for a turn.

Lesson 1: Students are always game for a new learning experience.

Once the furor abated I tried out the apps they installed and wandered around a fantasy world for a while. I moved around my physical space as I moved around the virtual space. I jumped, squatted, spun, reached, walked... I moved.

Lesson 2: When you are looking for ways to introduce movement into your classroom, VR is a great tool for kinesthetic learning!

After the fantasy exploration, the students tried to get me to cliff dive, and I was done. The roller coaster app was not enough for them. They needed to free-fall through space! I told them when I tried Google Expeditions at ISTE2015, and found myself on the side of Everest, I fell out of the chair was helped off the floor by a very sweet Googler who assured me that I wasn't the first person to do that. Still embarrassing.

Lesson 3: VR experiences are visceral and can help students develop empathy.

Augmented reality is cool, too. While less immersive, AR experiences have similar and important impact on teaching and learning. On a recent professional learning day, we set up a playground for teachers to visit between workshops or as a workshop session. One of the playground stations was an AR station. We downloaded the chemistry and anatomy triggers from Daqri, installed the Daqri app on the library iPads, and invited teachers to play with the element, heart, and body systems enhancements. Say goodbye to cellophane overlays that build the systems of the body in increasingly difficult to read layers! Now the systems can be added and removed by a touch of the finger and they layer and intertwine with one another as they do in a body.

Lessons 4&5: The interactive, multi-media, self-directed nature of VR and AR helps students orient to challenging concepts and gives them agency over their interaction with the content.

In the library specifically we are resurrecting a past initiative using Aurasma to create triggers out of book covers. When students meet in the library to select independent reading material, we are capturing short videos of them reviewing their books. Then, we make the video an overlay with the cover as a trigger. Students -- any library patron, really -- can follow our channel and scan the covers of books to see what fellow students say about them! Now, AR is not just about consuming information, but about the creation, by students, of new insights, learning, and content.

Lesson 6: In small and large ways, AR and VR experiences encourage students to explore previously inaccessible ideas and places expanding their passions and curiosity.

Needless to say there are much more expansive AR and VR experiences available for education than those in which we have dabbled. Our little experiences are helping us build a plan for more curricular integration of such experiences -- and more financial investment, too. In the meantime, these dabbles are helping us to expand our thinking about how to enhance teaching and learning, beyond the wow! factor.