T. Neto1, P. Tolmos2, S. Guo3, A. Nolla3
The EduCITY project exemplifies an innovative approach to integrating Mobile Learning and Augmented Reality (AR) in educational contexts, with the aim of improving student engagement and promoting sustainable urban development. EduCITY developed a mobile application to facilitate location-based educational games that incorporate AR multimedia resources, fostering an interactive and immersive learning environment. The EduCITY platform empowers users, including future teachers, without programming skills. When they design a game whith EduCITY, they have the possibility to define learning objectives, set challenging questions to guide students' exploration of urban spaces, e.g. Museums, and include multimedia content to create customised AR mobile games. In mathematics education, such predesigned educational routes are called math trails, which are attracting growing interest since they foster motivation and positive attitudes of students towards mathematics, as well as increasing the learning potential of the tasks.
Our study is based on the following research hypothesis: The process of designing and evaluating math trails that integrate Art and Augmented Reality positively influences the development of future teachers' teaching knowledge and skills necessary for the proper integration of a STEAM approach into their mathematics teaching practices. With this approach, we present the design and implementation of an EduCITY math trail at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which was tested in person by 10 prospective teachers from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), and virtually by 5 prospective teachers from the University of Aveiro (Portugal). The participants filled out questionnaires during each of the tasks and at the end of the trail. They valuated very positively EduCITY's ability to demonstrate the connections between Arts, and its capacity to promote the museum as a rich educational space with great potential for carrying out interdisciplinary and problem-solving activities in real contexts.
Keywords: STEAM, Mathematics Education, Mobile Learning, Augmented Reality, EduCITY.