MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY: Exploring a new genre of learning

The proliferation of smartphones provides easy access to experience augmented reality (AR), which has fundamentally shifted the conversation around educational technology both in and out of classrooms. Early research on this new genre of teaching and learning afforded by AR has shown to improve and/or increase learning performance, learning motivation, student engagement, and positive attitudes (Bacca et al., 2014). As mobile technologies reach ubiquity, educators have become exceptionally concerned with designing tools and activities that equip young people to engage with these technologies as producers not just consumers. Of equal significance is the critical issue of ensuring that all young people have equitable access to not only the technologies but also to be able to participate in creating the technologies (Kafai & Burke, 2013). In this column, our goal is to present one approach by which we can empower all young people to produce with mobile augmented reality technologies.