An Augmented Reality Mobile Learning Experience Based on Treasure Hunt Serious Game

One of the playful activities used in education is the treasure hunt, a serious game that allows students to work cooperatively. This activity stimulates different cognitive processes connected to accurately reading the clues and understanding them, and extremely effective to elaborate a collaborative strategy necessary to find the hidden objects. Augmented Reality is an innovative technology with a growing potential in promoting new scenarios to support teaching and learning processes. In this paper we present a learning activity based on a treasure hunt serious game developed with ARLectio (R). ARLectio (R) is an augmented reality authoring tool aimed at supporting the creation of educational resources that leverage the AR technologies to improve students' engagement. ARLectio (R) is characterized by an intuitive user interface that supports educational content creation based on different media types, such as: text, images, video, and 3D model, that will be accessed through mobile AR applications. From the architectural perspective, ARLectio (R) consists of a web-based AR authoring tool addressed to teachers for the creation of educational contents, and a mobile App in which the content is consumed by students within AR based educational activities. In the scenario described in this paper, ARLectio (R) is used by teachers to design an educational treasure hunt activity that will be accessed by students through their mobile devices. The topic of the treasure hunt is "Climate change and environmental sustainability". In a pilot study presented in this paper, students were divided into small groups, and they collaboratively interacted to solve some treasure hunt enigmas. The clues and enigmas are related to the school curriculum. For example, clues include the solution of simple mathematic and linguistic problems as well as historical references and notions of geography. The results of the pilot demonstrated a positive effect of the use of AR technologies in the level of engagement of students in the learning activities.