ARsenic: Designing a Gamified Augmented Reality Supplement for Grade School Physics

Physics has been reported as a difficult subject to tackle in grade school education due to student disinterest and low knowledge retention. Existing physical learning methods often revolve around physical experiments or text descriptions of physics topics, which lack visual aids and illustrations that allow students to understand the abstractness of physics topics. On the other hand, digital learning methods that attempt to address the aforementioned issues have gaps, such as being too complex for grade school students, not addressing the learning outcomes, and being limited to online PC games. Based on the limitations identified, this paper proposes ARsenic—a mobile application that provides gamified AR activities for friction, gravity, energy transformation, and simple machines. Combining gamification and AR, ARsenic seeks to enhance the students’ motivation, comprehension, and retention of physics concepts in grade school students. ARsenic’s design will be crafted by identifying learning outcomes of the chosen topics, addressing the gaps in existing learning methods, and consulting with domain experts specializing in grade school science education in the Philippines.