Pixel International Conferences

Dylan Wiliam (1998; 2009; 2011) concludes after studying vast amounts of research outcomes that “teacher quality is the major determinant of how much progress students make”. According to him interactive didactics in the form of formative assessment is a very powerful element to improve teacher quality.

Beata Staszynska and Onno Hansen (2016) found in five European projects and three Polish national projects that adding technology to interactive didactics has a serious advantage over just introducing interactive didactics. Technology can add the following effects to interactive didactics:

- Students engage more and open up more;

- Two minutes’ emotional highs can be triggered leading to “flow”;

-Visual information can be transferred leading to higher engagement, longer concentration spans and better tests results.

The technology Staszynska and Hansen tested out in educational settings mainly is Augmented Self Reality serious games. Whereas “Augmented Reality (AR) consists of a real-time video stream generated by a camera to which digital elements are added that appear in reaction to a predefined trigger”, Augmented Self Reality is a kind of Augmented Reality in which “the presence of the viewer on the screen is the essential feature ... It feels like it is us who are being augmented”. The serious games by Staszynska and Hansen are in essence interactive multiple-choice questionnaires.

As was found by Staszynska and Hansen (2016) during their projects the Augmented Self Reality games are adding to interactive didactics in ways that were described above:

- 90% of the students are engaged by them for around twenty minutes – a majority opens up;

- Questions and answering take no longer than 2 minutes – the augmentations provide emotional highs that lead to a situation of “flow” that lasts for the whole duration of the game;

- The augmentations are visual digital elements that are added to the webcam stream - they lead to higher engagement and longer concentration spans. The games were not tested for their effects on tests results.