ScoolAR: An Educational Platform to Improve Students' Learning through Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications has been investigated in several domains. As such, their application in educational settings has witnessed to a growing interest by the research community. Teachers can be assisted by AR/VR, in a way that students can strength the learning outcomes, gained during the classroom lecture. However, despite their potential has been widely assessed, there still exists a bottleneck preventing a widespread adoption in the education domain: the lack of easy to use platforms enabling teachers and students to become producers of AR/VR experiences. This paper fills this gap, by proposing a novel platform named ScoolAR, developed for didactic purposes. ScoolAR allows to create AR/VR applications without any programming skills. Up to now, there is no evidence in the state-of-art of a didactic tool that allows to create AR/VR applications without programming skills. From such premises, ScoolAR has been developed to overcome these limitations and to enable an autonomous content creation system and thus boosting more engagement and awareness in the exploitation of AR and VR applications in everyday educational scenarios. Beside describing the architectural framework of the proposed platform, this paper presents the results of experiments conducted in a real didactic scenario. Considering two group of students, the first group was assisted with the ScoolAR framework, the second one conducted the study phase with frontal lecture. The test performed proved that the first group outperformed the second one on all metrics of evaluation. Thus, the combined effort between common didactic activities and technological innovation permits to achieve superior results in terms of both knowledge and competences, especially for those disciplines (e.g. Cultural Heritage and History of Architecture and more) where the transversal learning is fundamental.