For effective learning to take place, a healthy and non-distracting environment is crucial. Nowadays for many students it becomes increasingly difficult to learn concentrated and without distractions. For more and more students, a regular look at the smartphone is part of the learning process.
Well here's the fix. Motivational Plants. ContemPlants!
"ContemPlant" was developed to support effective learning and concentration.
The idea is that students have to grow and maintain virtual plants that only grow if they try to learn "well" and concentrated, i.e. in this case if they learn at a quiet, well-tempered and well-lit workplace - without using the smartphone!
The core for this is the so-called "ContemPlant-Box", a clever combination of sensors in an aesthetically pleasing box, which is placed at the respective learning place.
Learning with ContemPlant is very easy and even fun: You download an app onto your smartphone, slide the smartphone into the box and start learning. The sensors in the box then continuously measure the quality of the learning environment and determine whether the smartphone is being used.
If you have finished learning and would like to get an assessment of the learning environment and your own learning discipline, all you have to do is pull the smartphone out of the box. With Augmented Reality, you can now use your smartphone to observe the virtual plant growing out of the box.
Once you have learned well, the plant becomes big and beautiful. If you learn badly and instead concentrate on other things, the plant will shrink.
This AR feedback is a fascinating way to get a feel for how you've learned - and definitely motivates you to make the plant grow!
This is the future of learning as we imagine it to be!
How do we make sure you're not using your phone while learning?
Here's the procedure:
- select one of your plants in the app
- slide your phone into the box, camera facing up
- your phone will scan a dynamic QR code off a hidden display and log you in automatically
- the weight of your phone is keeping a button pressed (2nd factor)
- ongoing session: the tiny outside display displays a check mark
- once you finish, you just pull your phone out
- as the button is no longer pressed, it triggers your log out
- the app switches to the AR view and your personally computed plant is projected onto the top of the box
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| 3D Model with inserted smartphone | Prototype with trackable surface |
Arduino, SeeedStudio, Raspberry PI, React, GraphQL, Apple AR Kit
- Gero Embser
- Leonard Eyer
- Daniel Gawrisch
- Laurenz Rasche
- Timon Palm
- Marco Rosinus Serrano
- Marcus Leibner
- Imke Dungs
- Ilja Hramcov
- Niklas Schmitz
This work was created as a course project in the summer term 2018
Official course name: "Programmierpraktikum Cyber-Physical Systems"
Our special thanks goes to
Tobias Pfeffer
for mentoring and support
and also to the chair of
Prof. Dr. Sabine Glesner
Software and Embedded Systems Engineering
Technische Universität Berlin