Ordinary Cambodia Student...​

Mother tongue: Khmer​

Around them: ​

• English speaking tourists​

• Chinese merchants​

• Learn little English at school​

• Enjoy any entertainments on phones​

Scenario 1: Nervous teen approaches fluent English speaker at a social event. He stumbles and forgets words and feels embarrassed. With the AR app, he can find forgotten vocabulary.​

Scenario 2: In a restaurant workplace, the young waiter approaches English-speaking tourists with menu and notepad.​ Teen struggles to answer questions due to language barrier.​ Teen uses AR app to learn relevant vocabulary and phrases such as the food.​

3. Social Communication:
100%/75% agree that the app is helpful for language learning/social communication.​

4. AR Enhancement:
All respondents agree that using AR technology makes the app better. 

My major role in this English learning AR project was to create a working prototype to illustrate the immersive learning experience and the possibility of lifelong learning with Augmented Reality technology.

In the ideation stage, we all brainstormed some ideas about how and who we should help for their lifelong learning goals and explored different possibilities of the solutions.

After the idea validation of the solution, I started to make the AR prototype application with Unity. After gathering information of the vocab content of the application, I implemented the object recognition features, Augmented reality environment set-up in the gamified application, text-to-speech features, and the game elements features. Then, we test and fix the user interfaces with actual devices.

Then, we build the prototype and deploy into the actual mobile devices for demonstration video and user testing. I also recorded the demonstration video.

At the early stage, one of the group mates proposed an alternative lifelong learning idea which is about the education among prisoners. It was a great idea but I suggested that it very hard for us to work on the user research, user testing and validation. And we aborted this direction of development and focused on the lifelong learning of teenager which specifically on English learning after further narrowing down our scopes.

It is a hard decision and we learnt a lot in terms of team-working and cooperation with a better project planning by understanding and identifying what should the project goals be, who are the target users, what we want to do and what we can do to achieve the goal.

I was also inspired by the finding from learning experience of students and teenagers living in less developed countries. In this project, we understand that new technologies are only the prerequisite. To achieve the goal of the product, we need to understand the users. I recalled one thing learnt by the seniors, "Do not get married to your ideas". Sometimes we think the technologies or ideas are so fancy and good but that may not be needed and unable to address to the actual user needs. After understanding the needs, we can actually make people's life better with the knowledge we have. And that is what makes the society advance.