Augmented Reality tools for teaching and learning

Smartphones and tablets are becoming less expensive and many students already bring them to classes. The increased availability of smartphones and tablets with Internet connectivity and increasing power computing makes possible the use of augmented reality (AR) applications in these mobile devices. This makes it possible for a teacher to develop educational activities that can take advantage of the augmented reality technologies for improving learning activities. The use of information technology made many changes in the way of teaching and learning. We believe that the use of augmented reality will change significantly the teaching activities by enabling the addition of supplementary information that is seen on a mobile device. In this paper, we present several educational activities created using free augmented reality tools that do not require programming knowledge to be used by any teacher. We cover the marker and marker less based augmented reality technologies to show how we can create learning activities to visualize augmented information like animations and 3D objects that help students understand the educational content. There are currently many augmented reality applications. We looked to the most popular augmented-reality eco-systems. Our purpose was to find AR systems that can be used in daily learning activities. For this reason, they must be user friendly, since they are going to be used by teachers that in general do not have programming knowledge. Additionally, we were interested in using augmented reality applications that are open source or free.