As the Phase 1 project has come to an end, the project team are busy writing the final report, with access to all the outputs, to disseminate and share with the wider community.
We have come so far with the development of Augmented Reality to support offender learners, not just in the UK, but across Europe with our wonderful partners in Belgium and Romania. The report and evaluations will show the development and feedback from both prison staff, teachers, managers, and the prison learners.
Developing Augmented Reality in Youth Offender Learning Project aimed to improve education results in offender institutions by introducing, developing and rolling-out the use of augmented reality to youth offenders in different institutions in the specific European countries. Through this project, the team developed high quality resources using Augmented Reality (AR), to engage learners who can access a range of resources, translated into their own native language, and to evaluate the effectiveness of using AR resources, to meet security and access requirements, ensuring that the resources are 'locked' from the outside world and access is monitored within security guidelines.
All project activities were directly related both to the objectives and to the learning needs of the young offenders and aimed to extend and enhance the learner experience using Augmented Reality as an engaging tool that enables learners to access the content 'at the point of need' and, this way, to widen participation for offender learners in partner countries because of production, dissemination and embedding of the AR resources. Also, both in transnational meetings and online meetings, the project partners shared good practices and adapted processes, resources, and outcomes transnationally. All the objectives of the project were successfully met, and the results obtained demonstrated the efficiency of the correlation between the activities and methods used. Each planned activity led to specific results. All results were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively, to determine the level to which they contribute to the achievement of the project objectives.
The project team feel Augmented Reality is one of many technical applications that can be used to support prisoners whilst in custody and on release. It can help those engaging with education, work, and training, those with a learning disability and difficulty and those with a visual impairment. For English speakers of other languages, it can help them address their offence, to maintain family ties, to become law abiding citizens and ultimately reduce reoffending. Reoffending still cost the UK taxpayer over £18 billion each year and prove a grave risk to public safety.
The use of digital tools and AR resources was an opportunity for prison staff to work with offender learners to help them rehabilitate. This in the long-term is good for society as it allows offenders to keep update with the digital age.