Application of Augmented Reality for Teaching Descriptive Geometry and Engineering Graphics Course to First-Year Students

The quality of modern engineering education is directly linked with the students’ ability to create and read the drawings of engineering structures. The subject “Descriptive Geometry and Engineering Graphics” taught in the undergraduate engineering studies develops students’ ability to analyse both the shape and design of real objects and, along with the spatial reasoning, the technical thinking. The development of spatial skills for engineering students is closely related with the success in their future professional career. The new information technologies (IT) offer novel opportunities to enhance the classic teaching approach used so far during mastering quite complicate and extensive courses, like engineering graphics. Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the many challenges of modern IT technologies which recently became available also for education purposes. It is supposed that AR will provide new possibilities to teach the contemporary generation of students in an attractive and more entertaining way. First part of the article describes the results of the application of didactic toolkit AR DEHAES based on Augmented Reality for development of spatial ability of students. In the second part of the article presented are the examples of 3D objects for the exercises of “Descriptive Geometry and Engineering Graphics” course prepared for the use into AR environment. The use of AR technology facilitates the students to acquire better practical skills in much shorter time during their academic studies and improves the quality of graphic education