AR Physics made for students with special education needs
The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on learners with disabilities raised the urgent need for adaptation of individualized learning plans, methods and tools. New ICTs potential for customisation of the teaching and learning materials to the individual needs of the SEN students is not fully recognised and adapted. Project ARphymedes Plus is an extension of the project ARphymedes, which focuses on developing an educational toolkit for physics education enhanced with Augmented Reality (AR) in order to make them available and easily accessible for SEN students. It integrates new technologies such as AR, computer games, text to speech, user environment adjustment and machine learning to the education toolkits for the physics education of SEN students at the secondary school. The project is particularly careful at the attractiveness of the content, based on a multimodal approach in education using Science, Technology and History as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, fostering creativity, imagination and interest in physics and STEM, and removing barriers leading to the social exclusion.
These important and ambitious objectives are reached developing a series of resources as:
- a digital version of the handbook for students for physics education, accessible also for people with disabilities thanks to text to speech, caption, braille printing, adjusted contents, etc.;
- an handbook for teachers providing indications about how to take advantage of the resources provided by partnership;
- an adapted version of the AR application, made suitable to be used also by SEN students to enable a full and immersive experience;
- a training programme for teachers to provide them the skills and the knowledge needed to best take advantage of the project’s results.
VITECO, thanks to its technical capabilities, is responsible for the development of the digital version of the handbook for students. It takes care of the external communication of the project, leading the various dissemination activities that are undertaken to spread its results as effectively as possible.
