Augmented Reality (AR) is a relatively new field in terms of the design of learning environments. For much of 2017 and early 2018, teachers and curriculum designers interested in exploring this field were dependent on engaging digital content creators and software developers in designing such learning experiences for students.

Currently, most learning interventions with AR are designed from the paradigm of an expert-led model of teaching, where the AR artifact is created by a domain expert; under such a paradigm, the learner has limited ownership of the process of artifact production.

In 2018, our team critically questioned this default paradigm.

We aimed to broaden the application of AR in education, specifically to history education, by exploring the affordances of such technology in mediating student-led learning activities, using the Learner-Generated Augmentation approach described in Lim et al. (2018). The current Singapore Secondary History syllabus adopts an inquiry-based approach. The need to memorize key facts is still an important part in formulating historical arguments. The study involved the design of a learning activity to help students memorize historical information more effectively by building upon the established memory technique of Memory Palace / Method of Loci. In this activity, students used a free AR mobile application - Just a Line - to sketch out memory palaces of key information from a prose passage. This activity was trialled on student-teachers who are majoring in History at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. After they had sketched their memory palaces in three-dimensions, they were interviewed on their experience.

This pedagogical approach – which we have dubbed Learner-Generated Augmentation – is distinct from the majority of learning interventions using Augmented Reality to date. Specifically, the majority of learning interventions with Augmented Reality are designed from the perspective of using the technology to exemplify the concepts to be learned.

For this project, the curriculum design paradigm is from the diametrically opposed perspective of tasking the learners (and not the domain experts) to depict such conceptual representations, using the augmentations afforded by Augmented Reality. In other words, instead of using Augmented Reality to help learners visualize the concepts, the technology is used to afford them the ability to sketch and represent their naïve and evolving conceptions for themselves.

This is consistent with the approach of Disciplinary Intuitions, and the Six Learnings framework.

In this way, their conceptions and intuitions about the respective topics are made more visible to their teachers and their peers, thereby making collaborative dialogue around their misconceptions more meaningful.

Our pioneering work in Learner-Generated Augmentation - as applied to memory and cognition - is described in a paper published in the British Journal of Educational Technology in 2020 and featured on the blog of the British Educational Research Association. We are grateful to Chen Jieyang for his help with the graphical representations of the learners' artifacts.