Designing for Active Learning: Putting Learning into Context with Mobile Devices

Abstract

This chapter will focus on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a recent location based, context aware system for urban education students, trainee teachers, and language learning students. We first describe the detailed design of a case iteration centered on urban education and then move on to briefly describe how the design was iteratively adapted using evolutionary prototyping for language learning. Evaluation results are presented which detail the range of learning outcomes achieved from the point of view of the students. We then discuss future work that incorporates social media and augmented reality. The chapter concludes by discussing the active learning that our design appears to encourage. A major conclusion is that there is much to commend the Zone of Proximal Development context sensitive design as a catalyst for active learning.