This study scrutinizes the existing literature regarding the use of augmented reality and gamification in education to establish its theoretical basis. A systematic literature review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was conducted. To provide complete and valid information, all types of related studies for all educational stages and subjects throughout the years were investigated. In total, 670 articles from 5 databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, IEEE, and ERIC) were examined. Based on the results, using augmented reality and gamification in education can yield several benefits for students, assist educators, improve the educational process, and facilitate the transition toward technology-enhanced learning when used in a student-centered manner, following proper educational approaches and strategies and taking students’ knowledge, interests, unique characteristics, and personality traits into consideration. Students demonstrated positive behavioral, attitudinal, and psychological changes and increased engagement, motivation, active participation, knowledge acquisition, focus, curiosity, interest, enjoyment, academic performance, and learning outcomes. Teachers also assessed them positively. Virtual rewards were crucial for improving learning motivation. The need to develop appropriate validation tools, design techniques, and theories was apparent. Finally, their potential to create collaborative and personalized learning experiences and to promote and enhance students’ cognitive and social–emotional development was evident.

This study aims to evaluate the impact of using augmented reality, gamification, and serious games in computer science education. The study presents the development process of an educational mobile application, describes an experiment that was conducted and involved 117 higher education students, and analyzes the results of a 49-item paper-based questionnaire. In total, 8 research questions were explored. The results of the study revealed that several educational benefits can be yielded when integrating such applications in teaching and learning activities and actively involving students in the design and development process. In particular, the application was assessed as an effective learning tool that could enrich and improve the educational process and create interactive, inclusive, and student-centered learning environments. Its use led mostly to positive effects and experiences while maintaining the negative ones to a minimum and most students expressed positive emotions. Students were able to learn in a more enjoyable and interesting manner, and their motivation, engagement, self-efficacy, and immersion were greatly increased. Students’ innate need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness was satisfactorily met and both their intrinsic and extrinsic learning motivations were triggered. They felt a sense of belonging and cultivated their social skills. The potential of the application to improve students’ knowledge acquisition and academic achievements was also observed. The application also enabled students to improve their computational thinking and critical thinking skills. Therefore, the potential of combining augmented reality, gamification, and serious games to enhance students’ cognitive and social–emotional development was highlighted.

This study aims to understand the public’s perspectives, sentiments, attitudes, and discourses regarding the adoption, integration, and use of augmented reality and virtual reality in education and in general by analyzing social media data. Due to its nature, Twitter was the selected platform. Over 17 million tweets were retrieved from January 2010 to December 2020 and four datasets were created. Two of them referred to the general use of these technologies and two to their educational use. The data was analyzed using text mining, sentiment analysis (e.g., polarity and emotion detection), and topic modeling methods. TextBlob, Word-Emotion Association Lexicon (EmoLex), Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) were some of the tools used. Based on the results, the majority of the public were positively disposed toward the general and the educational use of both augmented reality and virtual reality and mostly expressed positive emotions (e.g., anticipation, trust, and joy) when referring to them. In total, 11 topics emerged that were related to education, new technologies, digital and social media use, marketing and advertising, the industrial domain, the health domain, gaming, fitness and exercising, devices, the travel and tourism domain, and software development kits. The educational benefits of augmented reality and virtual reality, their ability to enrich both teaching and learning activities, and their role as effective educational means were evident.

Augmented Reality (AR) could provide key benefits in education and create a richer user experience by increasing the motivation and engagement of the students. To this end, the current paper presents a system with three AR applications for teaching physics in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school and in the first grade of secondary school, and the ultimate goal is the development of a unified platform that covers the subject of physics in all classes of K-12 education. The platform provides a useful tool to familiarize both teachers and pupils with AR technologies, aiming to improve the learning and teaching experience and to enhance their skills. The developed system is evaluated in terms of usability, gamification and willingness of the teachers to incorporate this technology into the teaching process. A total of 314 users participated in the research, where they were divided into three user groups: (i) teachers (N = 15), (ii) pupils (N = 189) and (iii) computer science students (N = 110). The outcomes were satisfactory, revealing that the gamified AR applications are easy to use, and teachers are interested in using these AR applications in their classrooms.

Active learning, a student-centered approach, engages students in the learning process and requires them to solve problems using educational activities that enhance their learning outcomes. Augmented Reality (AR) has revolutionized the field of education by creating an intuitive environment where real and virtual objects interact, thereby facilitating the understanding of complex concepts. Consequently, this research proposes an application, called “Cooking Math”, that utilizes AR to promote active learning in sixth-grade elementary school mathematics. The application comprises various educational games, each presenting a real-life problem, particularly focused on cooking recipes. To evaluate the usability of the proposed AR application, a pilot study was conducted involving three groups: (a) 65 undergraduate philosophy and education students, (b) 74 undergraduate engineering students, and (c) 35 sixth-grade elementary school students. To achieve this, (a) the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire was provided to all participants and (b) semi-structured interviews were organized to gather the participants’ perspectives. The SUS results were quite satisfactory. In addition, the interviews’ outcomes indicated that the elementary students displayed enthusiasm, the philosophy and education students emphasized the pedagogy value of such technology, while the engineering students suggested that further improvements were necessary to enhance the effectiveness of the learning experience.