Development of an App and Teaching Concept for Implementation of Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Data into School Lessons Using Augmented Reality

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for addressing my comment and concerns and for spending time to work on your manuscript.

I feel that my initial comments have been answered and although I see quite some potential for further discussions, they would likely not change the presentation significantly.

There are lots of things that could be discussed in more detail and more aspects that require some elucidation but for this version, I believe, the manuscript is good to go.

I here add a few comments and would encourage you to think about them and to consider adding a few sentences if possible and feasible.  I would also like to encourage you to think about the more technical development paper you had in mind as it would be an interesting addition.

I would welcome another paper in the future with more details, an expanded conceptual level, and a more in-depth experiment conduct. After all, there has been some time invested in the app development.

I here refer to my original comments:

Issue #1 - Students' response to AR aproach, as well as gender differences.

The sample size was already quite small and we decided against breaking it further down before going into the evaluation. We also decided against asking the students about excitement and boredom as these are hard to measure objectively

I understand your point regarding the sample size -- which, in a way, only confirms that this assessment might not be complete at this stage but that it is a first attempt to assess the suitability and that further work will be needed. I also understand that it seems difficult to measure excitement objectively as it is inherently subjective but that is why we have normalization methods.
Anyway, my question was not to measure it, but I asked if you could share some experiences regarding students' attitudes. There has been a certain classroom experience and the reader does not learn much about it.
Otherwise, it might seem that the introduction of that approach to the classroom is 'technocentric' and was motivated by the fact that it is possible but not necessarily feasible. I feel that if this project was originally motivated to improve education, one would need to report on the acceptance and associated emotional aspects as well.

Wouldn't that also drive the discussion for future improvements, I wonder? How else would you define the success, just by factual questionnaires?
Just some thoughts, feel free to either ignore or t include an additional sentence.

Issue #2 - App developer, development concept and UI design
This was meant to be in a different paper, but we decided to combine the two into one. All of this information is now included...

Thank you. And -- as a personal note -- I would not see any problem for another development paper, despite the background that you provided in this manuscript.  It would certainly make an interesting read.

Issue #3 - Worksheet material
This is now included in Chapter 2.5.

Thank you for including that information.

Issue #4 - Great Lakes, selection of study area

The topic was chosen due to data availability of HICO data and the small overlap between scenes applicable to state curricula. There was no image of a sufficient algal bloom in European waters and other topics were too hard to include in the curriculum. Furthermore, the material is aimed at students in the final years of high school, were topics from all over the world are covered by the curriculum, ...

Thank you for the background. I do feel that a discussion of the topic would be appropriate to include. After all, technological and communication approaches in combination with a good topic are what drives exciting education. Hence my question at the beginning how students felt about this topic. But these are just my thoughts, feel free to either ignore or incorporate an additional sentence.

Issue #5 - Background RS in STEM

This has now been included in the introduction. However, most educational material by organisations aims at college/university students.

Yes, I understand that there is not so much material perhaps. It is much appreciated that you included some background.

Issue #6 - Demonstration of AR component

This has now been included in Chapter 2.2

Thank you.

Issue #7 - Unclear results

Thank you for addressing my comments and for clarifying the background of the teacher and the students' higher level of knowledge at that point.
These are important pieces of information that would be valuable for the readership.

Kind regards.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you so much for your thorough and constructive comments in this and the previous review. They helped improve this paper significantly. We agree that many parts of this study could be evaluated in more detail, which we hope to do in a future study.

Issue #1 - Students' response to AR aproach, as well as gender differences.

You wished to know more about the students’ excitement, which is hard to measure objectively. We have shared a few sentences on the subjective experience for the attending app developer, although we are usually cautious about this. We hope this gives an impression of the classroom experience. 

Your question about the measure of success is currently answerable with “if the students understood what was asked of them”, although, in the long term, we would like to know whether these kinds of materials have any effect on how they view satellite images and whether it influences their decisions on studying or working in STEM further down the line, which is the ultimate goal of our whole project. That, however, goes beyond the scope of this study. We hope to measure this kind of effect long-term eventually.

Issue #2 - App developer, development concept and UI design

Thank you!

Issue #3 - Worksheet material

Gladly!

Issue #4 - Great Lakes, selection of study area

Thank you! The Great Lakes topic itself caused no noticeable reaction by the students and neither did we expect any, as topics from all over the world are expected on their level. In hindsight, we should have asked how they felt about the real-world application and the combination of topics from different school subjects. We will include these kinds of questions in our next study.

Issue #5 - Background RS in STEM

Thank you for understanding!

Issue #6 - Demonstration of AR component

Gladly!

Issue #7 - Unclear results

Gladly!

Thank you again for all your very helpful comments and your support!

Reviewer 2 Report

The article seems to be lacking in technical and theoretical innovation.  The contributions are not enough.

Author Response

While there is mostly tried-and-tested methodology on the remote sensing part, the augmented reality part is full of technical innovation and that we couldn’t find any other material like this speaks for its theoretical innovation. References 3-6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19-21, 40 support this, showing recent different approaches to RS-based and AR-supported education on which our app and study are built. [20] emphasizes how the majority of AR apps is developed on a low level and how few there are created by teams including researchers, programmers and educators – which ours does include.

Reviewer 3 Report

Its previous version did not provide a proper description of the work performed and the result obtained. I did not understand the usefulness of AR technology in the case of presented content away from the Great Lakes. Figure 12 in the current version of the article completely convinces me. The described application development technology from Unity version 5.6 to the 2019 convinces me of the originality of the work. It is a pity that the possibility of migrating the application to other system environments, e.g. iOS, has not been used. It requires some work in the Unity environment, but the popularizing benefit can be big. It is also worth considering the implementation of applications for MacOS, Windows or Linux environments. Their editions for tablets can provide even greater computing and data processing capabilities.

Author Response

Thank you very much! We’re happy we could convince you of this study’s value. The iOS version has been planned for a long while and will soon-ish hit the Apple Store.