Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning in Educational Virtual Heritage through Projective Augmented Reality

The global agenda in education foresees the integration of social and emotional learning to equip students to succeed in our evolving digital society. In this paper, we focus on deepening into the research on AR/MR technologies to foster students’ comprehension of socio-cultural values in historical contexts. We address this challenge by exploring the potential of the interaction paradigm called World-as-Support (WaS). We present a case study of an educational Virtual Heritage experience with primary students for a bomb shelter built during the Spanish Civil War. Our findings showed that the experience enhanced students’ capabilities to reflect upon high-level issues related to value human dignity, to grasp some of the essential qualities of the value solidarity and to connect historical events with present political situations in Spain. Finally, we discuss four design recommendations for learning activities based on the WaS concerning (1) the enhancement of students’ competences in collaboration, and communication; (2) critical thinking; (3) contextualization of historical contents; and (4) moral and ethical considerations for digital augmentation.