Augmented Reality and Its Use as a Helping Tool in Education

This work suggests the use of Augmented Reality in education to provide an additional tool to help students’ understanding of studied content through visual stimulation, while capturing their attention and motivating them to complete tasks proposed. This assistance can be especially important for online laboratories—whether remote, virtual or hybrid—since activities in these environments are often performed with no tutors present—as they can usually be done at any time and place. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not possible to apply studied theories inside classrooms;therefore, a form was structured on Google Forms and shared with 30 educators from different areas and levels of education, seeking to hear their perceptions about the use of technology in their classes. Then there was an analysis and selection of seven AR applications for both Android and iOS operating systems, which were compared to check which one seems to have greater efficiency when being handled by educators. It was concluded that the Augmania™ software would be the best option for these professionals to create AR projects and activities to be performed in their classrooms, since it presents a simple and intuitive interface, while also offering different possibilities to augment information. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Lab-based Education

Lab-based education plays an important role for students adopting science and technology-based careers. The sudden transition to a distance learning environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how teachers have tackled with providing lab-based teaching while trying to improve students' engagement and motivation, is the focus of the presented works. A good diversification of teaching approaches such as PBL, teamwork, gamification or the integration of complementary resources is presented. Additionally, the VISIR+ project is also addressed in the context of a study on Brazil's Educational reality, related to Engineering Education. The VISIR remote lab is also presented as a versatile tool, to be used in several subject areas, other than electronic and electrical circuits. © 2021 Owner/Author.