Serious games have showcased tremendous potential in transforming the way we teach and learn. This paper explores the potential affordances of Augmented Reality (AR) game-based learning, specifically in the context of preserving school heritage. The AR game-based learning experience is proposed to increase students’ knowledge of their school’s heritage. By incorporating digital technology and story-telling, the game is also proposed to make the subject of school heritage more tangible for the enhancement of learning. The study involves 10 students playing an AR adventure role-playing game (RPG) which uses device location within the campus of Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore, to trigger in-game events. To assess the effectiveness of the AR game-based experience as a medium for learning, a general survey is used to collect feedback about the gameplay experience, while a Situational Interest survey collects data about participants’ situational interest, which emerges in response to the learning environment created, using the Situational Interest Scale (Chen et al., 1999). Results confirmed a positive correlation between players’ situational interest and absorption of information, shed light on the significance of game design elements in influencing the gameplay experience, and pointed to specific rooms for improvement for future AR game-based learning environments. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an understanding of the wider effectiveness of game-based learning environments in educational contexts.

This paper describes an independent research study undertaken by a high school student under the mentorship of a Research Scientist at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. It explores how dialogic interactions on a given Mathematical topic, decimals, can be constrained in the remote learning platform Zoom. This research utilises Laurillard’s Conversational Framework for a small-scale intervention of two virtual learning sessions in Minecraft Education Edition, focusing on the decimal learning for primary school students. The study found that the overlapping of the immersive learning environment and remote learning platform engenders miscommunications, disorientation, and cognitive dissonance amongst both the teacher and the student, prolonging the discursive and adaptive phases in the dialogic interactions.

This paper describes a learning activity using Augmented Reality (AR) which seeks to take advantage of the potential for learning about history and culture through exploration. This is represented by a garden in a university campus that affords visitors a scaffolded experience comprising a game-driven narrative in which visitors to the garden may assume the roles of different protagonists. In addition, we also sought to design a paper-based board-game for visitors who are not yet able to visit the garden in person. Both aspects of the learning activity - namely, the game-driven narratives in the actual garden as well as in the board-game equivalent - were piloted in December 2020. The study suggests that a combination of Augmented Reality, storyline and role-play could increase the probability of encounters with spontaneous elements in learners' local environments that encourage learning.

This work-in-progress paper describes preliminary and on-going work in the design and use of an open-source immersive environment (OpenSim) to help mathematics students in secondary schools in Singapore learn about, tinker with, and discuss probabilistically-driven scenarios of the diffusion of virus infection. The environment was designed and developed in April 2020 and is being piloted in three schools in May 2020, with a view to possible scaling in the second half of the year.