The effectiveness of using augmented reality (AR) on assembling and exploring educational mobile robot in pedagogical virtual machine (PVM)

Augmented reality (AR) has shown potential for aiding users in their assembly tasks. It provides a magic-lens view of the physical object. Thus, assembly tasks become less demanding. An assembly task using AR provides a pre-defined sequence of actions with a minimum amount of information to do the task. Thus, there is a need to exploit the advances in AR technology to provide assemblers with a more sophisticated learning experience. Using AR to turn the physical object into a smart object that communicates and interacts with a user can result in an assembler achieving a more knowledge and a greater awareness of the technology and provide insights and a deeper understanding of the software components inside the embedded computing instead of only learning the assembly hardware components. This study used a Pedagogical Virtual Machine (PVM) to evaluate the learning effectiveness with AR. We presented an experimental work based on assembling and exploring a modularized mobile robot task called Buzz-Boards. A total of 36 students participated in the study; 18 students participated in both experimental and control groups. Findings demonstrated that the PVM with AR approach was more effective in learning achievement, learning activity enjoyment, and usefulness than the paper-based approach.