The main purpose of Visual Arts Education is the development of the student's competences, which arise from their understanding of the visual space and which are expressed through their transformation into the pictorial space. The pedagogical practices between 2011 and 2012 have shown that first-year students are having difficulties with the ability of spatial visualization and with the ability to depict their surrounding space through drawing.
In the doctoral dissertation, we focused on the research with innovative didactic tools, ie. a purpose-built, augmented-reality mobile application for Android that acts as an interface and, through digitization, draws attention to the laws of nature that emerge when transferring from real space to pictorial space, or the differences between experiencing and understanding the world through or without an interface. The application acts as a digital interface between the real and the pictorial space, as in parallel with changing the position of the mobile phone or its camera's viewpoint, it illustrates the changes of proportions and relations that appear on different views of the space by applying arrays of lines of different lengths and colors that follow angles and directions in a real-time snapshot. In the research, we established whether with the help of the application students were quicker to notice and raise awareness of problems arising in the transfer from the real to the pictorial space, and consequently to solve them more effectively. We also established how the mobile application affected the perception and understanding of the differences between the real and the pictorial space, and how it affected the learning process, the students' motivation and the performance of their artistic tasks.
The research that included 150 students was devised as a pedagogical experiment to identify differences in the quality of their depictions of different spatial prepositions or situations, using visual gradients within the experimental and control group. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were used in the research. Before performing the experiment, we determined the initial state, and then we determined differences in the quality of the student's depictions of different spatial prepositions or situations using visual gradients within the experimental and control group. Quantitative data were collected through student and observer questionnaires and assessments of the resulting art creations. For the evaluation, we used rating scales. The criteria for the evaluation were based on the correct use of visual gradients and a properly defined vanishing point and horizon line.
The aim of the qualitative analysis was to monitor and observe the events during the learning process in order to improve its organization and to determine the speed of observation, the ability to understand the problems of depicting space, and last but not least, to determine the quality of emerging art creations. The results of the research showed that new media, ie. a mobile phone and the augmented reality learning experience transmitted through it, prove to be a good combination or a successful didactic tool for drawing space according to the principles of linear perspective.
Based on the obtained results, we will be able to plan effective strategies to increase the students' performance in the arts and the quality of managing the learning process using modern didactic devices. The broader scientific contribution of the dissertation is focused on improving the expressiveness, relevance, and improvement of teaching and learning through the use of more advanced technologies.
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