uLearn: facilitating ubiquitous learning through camera equipped mobile phones

This paper describes a prototype application based on smartphone devices which supports independent learners within a mobile environment. The techniques employed allow children to rapidly gain access to a large repository of multimedia information through the use of a camera equipped mobile phone or smartphone. More specifically, the use of visual codes (Rohs M. et al., 2004) attached to locations and objects within a museum and park in Lancaster enable the retrieval of Web based information to be triggered by capturing images using the integrated CCD camera. Moreover, the location and orientation of the phone are used as contextual parameters in order to control the specific information to be retrieved by the system. The prototype described in this paper is currently under evaluation by groups of children in Lancaster in order to evaluate the use of this platform for teaching and learning. Our aim was to establish whether or not this user interaction technique could be harnessed for education based applications targeted at young children.