USING GOOGLE LENS AUGMENTED REALITY TOOL TO PROVIDE STEM EDUCATION IN BIOLOGY LESSONS

Abstract

Implementation of approaches which increase student’s motivation to study is embedded in national and international strategic programs, in particular, the New Ukrainian School concept and the Education 2030 strategy (UNESCO), and the main trends are outlined in the Europe development strategies 2020 and Europe 2030. A promising approach to enhancing student motivation is to use information technology in teaching. Augmented reality tools allow to immerse a student in the learning process through the combination of the real world and the virtual environment. However, these approaches are hardly used in the Ukrainian educational process. This is due to the lack of an intuitive software interface. Google Lens is one of the promising augmented reality tools that increase students' motivation for learning. It is affordable and easy to use and has a multilingual interface. Google Lens is integrated with Google Photos and Google Camera, which can be used on any Android device running Android 4.4 or higher and iOS. According to the study, the accuracy of Google Lens recognition is 92.6%. Only in 7.4% of cases, Google Lens did not give a positive result. This indicator is quite high and much higher than a possibility of a teacher to determine species diversity of plants. Thus, the use of this tool, especially in the conditions of expeditions and excursions, is relevant. For the first time the article highlights the peculiarities of Google Lens, such as the lack of ability to analyse endemic plants (ethno-Ukrainian), which rarely represented in the web-resources, and the impact on the quality of the analysis of the basic parameters of photography. Google Lens characterised by high potential for use in STEM / STEAM classes because it facilitates the implementation of the scientific method. To encourage the use of this tool, we have developed a technique that is available online on the website stemua.science.