Bringing Augmented Reality to the Computational Thinking Agenda:Designing AR Authoring Tools for Novice Users to support Creation, Reflection and Collaboration

Augmented Reality (AR) blends the real world and digital content. It is increasingly becoming part of everybody's everyday life and it has the potential to change how we experience digital information in the future, introducing implications different from what is seen in other technologies and how we experience the physical world. As the current development of AR technology is limited to users with a high level of technical skills, this calls for a need to democratize the future development of AR. Recent movements within Computational Thinking (CT) have proposed to broaden the focus from only teaching technical skills to empower users to understand, create, and reflect on the technologies they meet in everyday life. While other technologies such as ML/AI and IoT have been increasingly explored in this regard, AR has so far been left out of this agenda. This dissertation proposes to bring AR to the CT agenda. From a constructionist approach, this dissertation explores how we can design AR authoring tools to enable everybody to create and reflect on AR technology in order to take part in developing our future with AR. <br/><br/> Through the work on five different AR authoring tools for novice users across various domains, target users, and AR devices, this dissertation explores how we can design AR authoring tools for novice users to support the broad CT agenda. This dissertation makes three overall contributions. <br/> First, I demonstrate how we can design an AR authoring tool to support users in reflecting on the implications of AR technology. Second, I present a set different AR authoring tools that support novice users in creating AR applications. Based on an analysis of these tools from a CT perspective, I propose a set of design principles for designing AR authoring tools for novice users that are independent of domain and AR device types. Finally, based on proxemics theory, I propose a language for understanding the collaborative qualities of co-located AR, and use it in the context of AR authoring to discuss how we can design collaborative AR authoring tools. Together, these contributions are intended to bring AR to the CT agenda, and support future research, design, and development of AR authoring tools for novice users.