AUGMENTED REALITY IN ROMANIAN SCIENCE EDUCATION: PROS AND CONS
Authors: Craciun Dana , Bunoiu Madalin 
Published: February 2023

The use of ICT in education through the integration of Web 2.0 applications and open online education resources leads to an increase in the motivation and involvement of students in their own learning process, promoting a collaborative-participative learning and facilitating the development of necessary 21st century skills (learning and innovation skills; information, media, and technology skills; life and career skills; adaptability; complex communication/social skills; non-routine problem solving; self-management/self-development; and systems thinking).
The use of the aforementioned resources in science education through various devices (computers, smartphones, or tablets) determines teachers to continuously adapt their perspective upon the design and management of the teaching process and to acquire new professional and transversal skills, since an exemplary science education can offer a rich context to develop most of the necessary 21st century skills.
From a pedagogical perspective, the use of new media is of outmost importance to support learning and to obtain educational benefits which can be a result of an enrichment/extension/completion of the learning experiences offered to students in the real world with those based on virtual reality.
We refer here to a new visualization option offered to science education through ICT, namely augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality is a superposition of virtual information on the real environment, in real time and 3D format [1]. Nowadays AR applications are only occasionally used in science education, being mainly seen as a technology for entertainment and informal education. Nevertheless, this visualization technology has a great potential for formal education, developing life skills and facilitating new learning experiences. We can envision an orchestration of the teaching process [2] based on role-playing or student interactions with the physical locations in their environment with emphasis on the design of learning experiences [3].
Currently, two types of AR implementations exist: a) location-aware AR, in which locations in the real world are augmented with GPS location-based narration and/or relevant scientific information; respectively b) vision-based AR, in which the digital information can be visualized once the camera of the mobile phone has been positioned over a target object (ex. QR cod, imagine, 3D target, etc.) [4]. Regardless of the visualization technology used, its teaching value derives from the way teachers are able to direct learning experience through the proposed instructional design, starting from the desired learning outcomes. For science education, we refer here to the collaborative-participative experiences which are the result of applying teaching methods such as investigation, observation, peer coaching, jigsaw, etc.
Starting from these general observations, we present in this study the various options in which AR can be used to create authentic learning experiences in Romanian science education. We also describe and analyze free apps developed for this purpose (Aurasma, ZooBurst, Wikitude).
Finally, we study the attitude of future teachers towards using learning and visualization technologies in their future teaching, emphasizing their main fears but also what they consider to be the main advantages of integrating technology and in particular AR in science education.