DARSE - Digital AR Student Engagement

Following a survey during lockdown periods, teachers and parents noticed changes in the engagement of students, mainly aged between 6y and 15y.

Our solution is a mobile Augmented Reality app that makes available, around the students, artifacts from school (videos, images, audio) to put them again in the school context. The teacher can provide helpers (hints, 3D interactive models, pictures) to make the lessons and exercises more engaging, add challenges and gamifications to promote the engagement and interaction.

The app overlays the video of the lesson the teacher gave in class on the chapters in the book or on QRcodes  allowing the student to access the teacher’s methodology at any time.

The students can also add their own content overlayed on common items found around them, to share questions and answers, initiate discussions with their teachers or among them and upload helpful information (notes, images, links and audio explanations)

83% of parents and teachers noticed decrease in the engagement of students, aggravated by the Covid lockdowns, mainly due to lack of context and methodology when studying at home. In addition, most of these students don't have access to high end equipment (good internet, laptops, etc.) and/or teachers at home (even parents). The most impacted age group are students between 6 and 15 years old. Darse hopes to provide an affordable, and personalized school context everywhere to increase engagement and interaction between teachers and students, in both directions, as well as students among them.

Darse is a mobile Augmented Reality app that makes available, around the students, artifacts from school (videos, images, audio) to put them again in the school context.

The solution relies on the new capabilities of Augmented Reality platforms made possible recently. It is heavily pushing for the adoption of augmented reality in mobile devices in the learning experience and more broadly in the categorization of data based on the environment, in this case, the textbook at hand, the board in front of the student or even a peer exchanging information.

 The teacher can provide helpers (hints, 3D interactive models, pictures) to make the lessons and exercises more engaging, add challenges and gamifications to promote the engagement and interaction.

The app overlays the video of the lesson the teacher gave in class on the chapters in the book or on QRcodes  allowing the student to access the teacher’s methodology at any time.

The students can also add their own content overlaid on common items found around them, to share questions and answers, initiate discussions with their teachers or among them and upload helpful information (notes, images, links and audio explanations)

Darse's first target is students aged between 6y and 17y along with their parents and teachers. Outside school context, this population cannot or can rarely interact and exchange discussions, ideas, courses, etc. which makes it hard to be and feel engaged. 

To achieve Darse's ultimate target, we will start by creating a prototype with manually uploaded/maintained content and minor gamifications. The latter will be tested by a class (teacher and students) in one school for a specific course. Following this period, we will analyse the results and prepare for seed funding. In addition, based on their feedback, the prototype will be adapted. 

Darse allows creating a school context everywhere, increases interaction among students to help each other or even feel at school and provides interactive course with the teacher along with specific notes. Last but not least, by gamifying the courses, Darse makes studying more fun and engaging.

Most importantly, by design, Darse will offer to any student (regardless of the location, wealth and equipment) at any time with low-connectivity settings, an access to the school context and material, which allows us to target communities who don't access to an equitable environment. 

With the pandemic, access to school context and material by everyone was not possible, mainly for students between 6y and 15y without proper equipment or parental guidance. 

Our solution based on Augmented reality, uses low-connectivity settings to allow creating school context and provide proper content for all students everywhere. It also encourages interaction between parents, teachers and peers themselves. 

The prototype already tried with refugees, aged 14 to 16, using their own mobile phone with low internet connection, showed a very good adoption and encouraged us to evolve it and expand to a wider community .

A prototype (Link to protoype) was put in place and tested with a group of refugees aged between 14y and 16y in 2018, with a collaboration of a NGO called LASER. Following our observations in the pandemic, the product evolved and included new features. These additions are at a concept stage; they are done on wireframes and tested with a community of students. We are looking  forward to have a fully functional prototype, including all requirements in order to start developing the product.

DARSE uses augmented reality and proposes an alternative to learning management systems (Moodle…) that is easier to handle and provide a better User Experience and a more collaborative and social learning.

The educational models were already experimenting different mobile learning approach and using Augmented Reality is in the experimentation phase in education.

The content provided by peers and by teachers is coupled with the printed or digital text book and the student will be able to personalize the data relevant in the context of his/her studies. 

In addition to that, gamification is a new approach adopted in several fields for multiple purposes and the latter was tested successfully.

Although online classes became the new trend with the pandemic, we believe that recreating the school context outside it, is not yet provided by any application and this is a main point to increase the interaction and engagement.

Lastly, Darse requires a low cost equipment to reach its purpose, which makes it affordable for everyone.

For example, the teacher can, via a mobile phone, upload content and select on which targets they will be displayed. This will lead to a voice note on top of a homework giving instructions, a small sketch to give hints on a complex exercise to solve, the video of the course given in class on a card (QRcode distributed at school or any playing card found at home) or on the title of the chapter in the book

Darse' s initial prototype was serving the students who are connected to the NGO we are working with; they are around 30 refugee students attending Lebanese high school. We were working with them to collaborate easily in their learning and help each other achieve better results and at the same time reducing the drop out rate of these students from school

The enhanced version during the pandemic is still under test with a couple of students to explore the possible fields. 

In one year, we aim for building a complete application to serve a full class of 20 students for a specific course. This would be considered as a full immersive learning experience and gamification

In the next 5 years we will be deploying the application to several schools in Lebanon and outside it for students in several grades and following multiple courses. The target is set to main courses such as mathematics, science, languages and even physical education for 9 grades for a class of 25 students in at least 10 schools.

While working with our partner NGO, we knew that 10% of eligible refugee students for high school actually reach it and only 1% reach universities. One of the reasons of the drop out rate is the lack of support to overcome educational difficulties that start to arise when joining high school. The same happens in families with financial difficulties. We want to be able to reduce the number of drop outs and provide a better support for students.

Another indicator we measured during the lockdown period is the student engagement. The small survey we did showed 83% decrease in engagement. We are targeting to increase the student engagement again

3 part-time staff and 1 UI/UX Contractor

AR Beirut Meetup group with 304 developers/enthusiasts 

Possible expansion with other contacts ready to jump in for expansion:

country representatives: 1 in Jordan, 1 in France, 1 in Canada

1 business developer, 1 project manager, 1  child safety consultant , 1 accountant 

we have a mixed team of developers, UX/UI expert, teacher that have a very strong network in the software development community and among teachers in Lebanon. We are also leading the AR/VR Beirut Meetup group. We also have built a network with a community in Jordan while working in the RLA program that will make it easy to expand in Jordan and we have contacts in Paris and Montreal that can help enter the markets their. 

Gloria Moussalem: Professional Release management, product manager and Quality Assurance expert in the last 10 years. Passionate for sports education and social activities

 Sabine Chamoun: High School Math teacher since 2001 and complementary math department coordinator. Advocate and implementer of innovative learning approaches.

Youssef Chamoun: Experienced Developer since 1999 (java/C/Python, AR/VR, AI/ML). Several years of experience in startups (web2.0, workflow automation, B2C video management, PaaS, AR). Scouts leader for 12 years helping kids 12 to 21 years old. 

The team is by itself diversified and with our partners we are proud to say we represent several religious groups in a country that is torn apart by the segregation based on religious sects. Our pride comes from the fact that we didn't do an extract effort to have a diverse team of partners, we only focused on looking for like minded people willing to put personal effort to support students who don't have access to equitable learning environments and we ended up discovering that this is a cross religious/sect/region/ethnicity/... goal

The solution we are proposing by itself empowers the students to help each other and elevate leaders from their ranks to support others in their learning and education journey

We believe that we are in a stage at which we should look at stronger collaboration with entities like Solve to be able to take our solution to the next level. We need the proper opportunity makers and a good networking to transform our idea from a pilot to a real solution 

The major barrier that we see is scaling the application. Since our application relies on collaborative learning, it is hence relying on crowd sourcing. In order to do that, we need the proper networking and media exposure

We don't have specific names in mind

Organizations working with students between the age of 6 and 18 can help us promote the solution we are providing and help us test the mobile application with the students to get the proper feedback and move towards a human centered design approach.

Our solution promotes both a better teacher-students communication and a student-student communication. In the user testing we did with refugee students on our solution, we noticed that they can actually benefit from it not only to get access to engaging content to help them study, but they can also support other students in their studies and this will empower them to feel more at ease in the host communities and even get recognized in these communities.

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We consider that DARSE answers the innovative technology-powered solutions GSR is looking for in solutions as we base our solution on Augmented Reality in a mobile application. Furthermore, our aim with the solution we are providing is to support local communities with no access to more expensive tools (laptops, high speed internet) and facilitate their studying experience in an aim to reduce drop outs from schools. 

If we are lucky enough to win the GSR Prize, we will use it to provide free licenses to less fortunate kids in local schools and to support public school teachers provide a high end technological solution to promote engagement at no additional cost.