One of the reasons we started this project is that reaction engineering, the
course which we're using it in, is really difficult to build a laboratory
around, because this involves like gigantic reactor vessels and, you know,
arranging configurations of reactors on an industrial scale, like piping and
heating and cooling. And so by putting it in this context of small 3-D
printed chemical reactors, the students can do something that's really complex
and expensive that normally wouldn't be possible.
I'm gonna try something crazy. Let's see if this works.
This is our augmented reality table and it uses
computer vision to recognize objects. So we have two types of object that
represents two different chemical reactors. This is a CSTR; this is a PFR.
And on the bottom they have two different symbols. All the ones of the
same type have the same symbol so that the computer can recognize them.
And underneath this glass here there's just a camera pointed at the back of the
screen that recognizes the images projected. The projector underneath
projects the visuals that let the users know what's going on.
So this is the control panel for the software that we have. This is what the camera sees when
you place objects. So this part shows how the background subtraction is.
When you remove the background the camera only sees the objects that you place
and they start the feed that the command center gets, the simulation happens and it's
projected by other projector. When I came to my students with the idea about doing
something in augmented reality we iterated a lot about what would be the best way
to accomplish this so that students could collaborate and have it be tactile
and be interactive. So we came up with this idea with this table here with the
the glass surface of the projector underneath and webcam underneath,
and my student Rannier had a background in carpentry, luckily, and so he was able to
construct this in just a couple weeks. And Heta, the other student who works
with me, she helped a lot too and learned a lot about woodworking. And as a group
we painted it together and we like worked on the weekend on getting the
this whiteboard paint to work and so it actually is a functioning white board.
Which is really exciting.
Because it's an open inquiry it invites many diverse inputs, or on-ramps, for learners so they can
bring many different ways that they understand chemical reaction engineering
to the literal table and reason with those understandings. They get to use their
own language and all of that is really important for nurturing diverse
participation in STEM, which is a goal of all of ours. Before this sort of tool you
would have to either do it pen and paper style where you basically solve a system
of equations and calculate essentially these numbers the final yield of the
entire system. So we're doing everything except the last step for the students by
simulating this display and letting them sort of play around with it by hand instead.
Part of the big advantage I see is you can like try different things and
just see what happens without having to go make an Excel spreadsheet and like
type out all the calculations and it gives us something really visual
which is good. So rather than looking at, like, little words on our in our cells in
Excel that say like PFR and looks at 30 different temperatures, you can
literally say here, spin the dial, change the temperature, put a new reactor on and
see what it does. When we did our first trial we compared augmented reality
to a control group in the other room. Tthe experimental group that got to use
augmented reality did at least three or four times as many trials as the group
in the control. We also found that the AR table learners scored higher on
their conceptual assessments but I think what matters most is that they had an
opportunity to really use their understandings in a meaningful context.
And that's sort of the philosophy of this approach, is that augment reality
allows us to go after concepts that are normally inaccessible to laboratories.
So something like quantum mechanics, something like wave mechanics, at like a
planetary scale, or the chemical reaction networks, we can approach these in a way
that students can still get that hands-on learning they would get in a
normal undergraduate laboratory in classes where this is impossible.