Overcoming the problems faced by student's in learning engineering drawing with the implementation of augmented reality learning environment

Abstract

Engineering drawing is one of the compulsive course for engineering students in higher education. It is compulsory for them to master the course since it is the basic skills needed as an engineer. In engineering drawing students faced difficulties to understand the complex concepts of this course due to the lack of visualization skills. Thus, this study aims to find out the problems faced by first year undergraduates engineering students in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in learning orthographic and isometric projection and the effects of implementing augmented reality learning environment towards their combining 2-dimensional object skills. To find out the problems faced by students, qualitative research approach is used among the respondents which involves 5 undergraduates engineering students. Meanwhile, 30 students were chosen as respondent for a quasi-experimental research design to find out the effectiveness of the implementation of augmented reality learning environment in engineering drawing teaching and learning process. Students were given a set of pre-test before being exposed to augmented reality learning environment and a set of post-test after the intervention. The test involved in this section is Differential Aptitude Test of Space Relation (DAT:SR) which is used to determine the students level of combining 2-dimensional object skills. As for data analysis, structured interview is used as research instruments for the qualitative sections and the results are analysed using thematic analysis to find out the problems faced by students in learning engineering drawing. For quantitative section, descriptive and inferential statistics were used to find out the effectiveness of the intervention. Descriptive statistics were used to find out the mean and standard deviation value of the data while paired sample t-test were used for inferential statistics to find out the significant differences for the test- results. The findings of this study found that most of the respondents are having difficulties in visualizing the 3 dimensional objects from the 2-dimensional projection images and vice versa which they prefer to learn using 3D computer-aided animation as teaching aid. Other than that, this study also found that students' are able to improve their combining 2-dimensional object skills when learning using augmented reality learning environment. While spatial training is a must to engineering students, utilization of advanced technology could be great alternatives to help students in improving their spatial ability.