From Tangible to Augmented: Designing a PhonoBlocks Reading System Using Everyday Technologies

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an augmented reality (AR) system that supports early reading and spelling acquisition of English for children. The design of the AR system was based on and extends our prior tangible reading system called PhonoBlocks. In this paper, we discuss why and how we extend the work from PhonoBlocks to an AR system design. The goal of our system is to teach children explicit letter-sound correspondences. Two key design features of our system, which are different from other systems, are the use of augmented dynamic colour cues and 3D physical lowercase letters that help to draw children's attention to how letters' positions in words change letter sounds. Unlike our previous system, our AR system uses off-the-shelf technology so it can be easily scaled and distributed. We discuss the advantages and opportunities for our AR solution, and outline our future plans for evaluating this system.

References

1. J. Barreira, M. Bessa, L. C. Pereira, T. Adão, E. Peres, and L. Magalhães. 2012. MOW: augmented reality game to learn words in different languages: Case study: learning English names of animals in elementary school. Proceedings of CISTI'12, 1--6.
2. Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, and Ivan Poupyrev. 2001. The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface. Computers & Graphics 25, 5: 745--753.
3. Stanislas Dehaene. 2009. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Penguin.
4. Min Fan. 2017. Exploring the design of a tangible system supported for learning to read and spell in at-risk and EFL children. PhD Thesis. Simon Fraser University, Canada. http://summit.sfu.ca/item/17190.
5. Min Fan, Alissa N. Antle, and Emily Cramer. 2016. Design rationale: opportunities and recommendations for tangible reading systems for children. Proceedings of IDC'16, ACM, 101--112.
6. Min Fan, Alissa N. Antle, Maureen Hoskyn, Carman Neustaedter, and Emily S. Cramer. 2017. Why tangibility matters: A design case study of at-risk children learning to read and spell. Proceedings of CHI '17, ACM, 1805--1816.
7. Eva Hornecker and Andreas Dünser. 2007. Supporting early literacy with augmented booksexperiences with an exploratory study. Proceedings of GI-Jahrestagung'07, 555--559.
8. N. N. Mahadzir and Li Funn Phung. 2013. The use of augmented reality pop-up book to increase motivation in English language learning for national primary school. Journal of Research & Method in Education 1, 1: 26--38.
9. Iulian Radu. 2014. Augmented reality in education: a meta-review and cross-media analysis. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 18, 6: 1533--1543.
10. Manoela Silva, Rafael Roberto, and Veronica Teichrieb. 2013. Evaluating an educational system based on projective augmented reality. Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education, 24, 1: 214--223.
11. Poonsri Vate-U-Lan. 2012. Vate-U-Lan, P. 2012. An augmented reality 3d pop-up book: the development of a multimedia project for English language teaching. Multimedia and Expo, IEEE, 890--895.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Education

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)