Going Down the Abstraction Stream with Augmented Reality and Tangible Robots: the Case of Vector Instruction

Despite being used in many engineering and scientific areas such as physics and mathematics and often taught in high school, graphical vector addition turns out to be a topic prone to misconceptions in understanding even at university-level physics classes. To improve the learning experience and the resulting understanding of vectors, we propose to investigate how concreteness fading implemented with the use of augmented reality and tangible robots could help learners to build a strong representation of vector addition. We design a gamified learning environment consisting of three concreteness fading stages and conduct an experiment with 30 participants. Our results shows a positive learning gain. We analyze extensively the behavior of the participants to understand the usage of the technological tools -- augmented reality and tangible robots -- during the learning scenario. Finally, we discuss how the combination of these tools shows real advantages in implementing the concreteness fading paradigm. Our work provides empirical insights into how users utilize concrete visualizations conveyed by a haptic-enabled robot and augmented reality in a learning scenario.