AR for Outdoor Field Learning
Alan Y. Cheng, Jacob Ritchie, Niki Agrawal, Elizabeth Childs, Cyan DeVeaux, Yubin Jee, Trevor Leon, Bethanie Maples, Andrea Cuadra, James A. Landay
- Role
- Built the AR features, including placing AR koalas on a real tree and the infrastructure that places a virtual tree in each learner’s physical location so they can watch it grow.
- Study
- Field study with 44 children in grades 4–6
- Tools & techniques
- Augmented reality, mobile app development, anchoring AR content in real-world locations, and field studies with children.
Field trips can boost children’s interest in science, but they are hard to run without a lot of adult support. Kiki’s Adventure is a narrative mobile app that guides children through a hands-on lesson on a real eucalyptus tree. Computer vision recognizes the tree, then AR activities anchor to it: children place virtual koalas in its branches, measure its height, and plant a virtual seedling. In a study with 44 children, the AR activities were among their favorite parts of the lesson and made the outdoor experience more engaging and memorable.
Concept and Design
The AR system extends narrative-based outdoor learning with three immersive features:
- Tree Recognition with CV – A fine-tuned ResNet-18 classifier, trained on 4,100 images from iNaturalist and field photos, identifies eucalyptus trees with over 96% accuracy. Integrated with the app’s camera, this recognition step anchors AR overlays to the correct tree.
- AR Koala Placement – Learners can place virtual koalas (Kiki and Coco) into real trees, merging digital characters with the local environment.
- AR Measurement and Planting – Interactive tools let children measure tree height using AR perspective lines and plant a virtual eucalyptus seedling that appears to grow in the soil.
These activities were choreographed to fit the learner’s physical movement around the tree, ensuring that AR prompts (e.g., stepping back to measure height) aligned with spatial context. The AR features were designed to keep the experience multisensory and embodied.
Results
The evaluation with 44 children in grades 4–6 showed that AR made the outdoor learning experience more engaging and memorable, even though it did not always produce stronger quantitative learning gains compared to the narrative-only variant. Children frequently highlighted the AR activities—especially placing the koala, planting the virtual tree, and measuring height—as some of their favorite parts of the lesson. Participants described the AR as “putting virtual reality and real life together,” and many were impressed by how seamlessly digital elements blended with the eucalyptus tree. Although AR features did not directly enhance content mastery beyond narrative alone, they amplified curiosity, multisensory interaction, and enjoyment—factors that can sustain motivation for outdoor learning.