Teaching based on augmented reality for a technical creative design course

•Design a creative design teaching scheme with the introduction of AR.•Develop two AR-based and teaching scheme related teaching aids.•Demonstrate the AR-based teaching scheme improves the learning motivation.•Demonstrate the scheme helps students to experience the complete creative design process.•Demonstrate the AR-based teaching scheme improve the creativity of the outputs.

Student creativity is currently attracting considerable attention. An increasing number of high schools in China are trying to improve the learning motivation and creativity of students, as well as the teaching efficiency of creative design, by introducing augmented reality (AR) technology into creative design courses. However, many teachers have only limited knowledge of AR, and software developers are not familiar with general creative design education, which makes it difficult to incorporate AR in such courses. In many high schools in China, the lack of relevant teaching facilities and creative design equipment means that the environment in which the technology curriculum is applied still has a long way to go to meet the real requirement of curriculum. To address these problems, we present a general technical creative design teaching scheme that includes AR. Our approach is based on the ARCS model of motivational design, social psychology, and a computational model of creativity. Two teaching aids are introduced to support this teaching scheme: “AR Creative-Classroom,” which explains the domain-relevant knowledge of creative design, and “AR Creative-Builder,” which helps students to build actual AR scenes. The results of a pilot study show that the proposed teaching scheme significantly improves learning motivation, student creativity, and the teaching of creative design.