Enhancing the Augmented Reality Sandbox's Software and Hardware to Support Quantitative Simulation for STEM Education

Villanova University, Villanova PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing and evaluating the Augmented Reality Sandbox to advance technical curricula in civil engineering and environmental science courses. The Sandbox is a widely deployed STEM classroom tool that enables students to model landscapes with sand and observe how virtual water flows over the landscape. Its basic design consists of a box of sand on a table with a short-throw projector and an altimetry sensor mounted about 3 feet above the sand. The altimetry sensor passes a 3D scan of the sand surface to software that generates a color elevation map of the surface and projects it onto the surface of the sand. The software projects virtual water flowing across the sand landscape according to the fluid dynamics driven by the sand surface's shape. This project will advance the geophysical principles that the Sandbox can model by adding new simulation capabilities to its open-source software. The project aims to improve educators' understanding of best practices for this tool by measuring the Sandbox's effect on students' performance in courses. By bringing together a team of investigators from both civil engineering and environmental science, the project will produce laboratory projects and evaluations that will impact the pedagogy of geophysics and hydrology topics common to both fields. It will also meet a critical need for updating the Sandbox's software to work with newer altimetry sensors, thereby extending the Sandbox's life as a classroom instrument. Project outcomes will include publication of findings on best practices for using the classroom tool. The project will add new capabilities in the Augmented Reality Sandbox's software. The scope of the new abilities covers modeling drainage basin delineation, as well as defining and representing infiltration rates for regions in the landscape, rainfall rates over regions of the landscape, and scale factoring for the sandbox's modeled area. These software extensions will provide students in environmental science and civil engineering courses with engaged learning experiences that depict the dynamics of the water cycle and support both quantitative and qualitative modeling. This project will also develop hardware extensions to the sandbox frame's design to support rapid turnaround on laboratory project setup between lab periods and consistent sand landform models across lab periods and projects. The project's evaluation goal is to study the Sandbox's effectiveness in student learning. The project will evaluate both the original and the extended versions of the Sandbox through student surveys and analysis of aggregated scores on pertinent exam questions. With this information, the project will advance understanding of the Sandbox's effect on students' qualitative understanding of geophysical processes. The project will also investigate conditions under which the Sandbox's new modeling capabilities help students understand geophysical processes through simulations. The project aims to improve educators' understanding of best practices for this tool by measuring the Sandbox's effect on students' performance in courses under varying numbers of laboratory projects in which students use the Sandbox. The NSF IUSE:EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.