The Development of a Markerless Augmented Reality Application for Teaching Prayer Procedures to Young Children

Abstract

Learning prayer procedures to young children requires instructional media that can present movement sequences clearly and attractively. This community service project developed an Android-based markerless Augmented Reality (AR) application, named AR Shalat, to visualize the movements of the five daily prayers as three-dimensional animations without printed markers. The application was developed using the Waterfall model through requirements analysis, system design, implementation, and functional testing. Markerless plane detection was implemented using ARCore in Unity, while the three-dimensional character and movement animations were created in Blender. Functional black-box testing showed that the main application functions, including camera initialization, plane detection, 3D character placement, animation playback, and menu navigation, operated as intended. Under the tested conditions, plane detection was completed in less than 3 seconds on textured surfaces with adequate lighting. The application was also directly tried by young children as the intended users to observe its ease of use and their responses to the three-dimensional visualizations. However, learning effectiveness was not quantitatively evaluated. These results indicate that the application is technically feasible as an interactive visual aid for introducing prayer procedures to young children. Further evaluation using standardized usability and learning-outcome instruments is required before conclusions regarding educational effectiveness can be made.