VISTA: A teaching aid to enhance contextual teaching

In this study, an innovative tool for enabling contextual teaching based on visual inputs, named Visual Stimuli-based Teaching Aid (VISTA), was developed. This system establishes the meaning and significance of concepts that are taught in the classroom within different environmental contexts. The idea of contextual teaching has been deliberated for more than a decade now. Nevertheless, using this in a classroom with limited time and resources has several challenges. VISTA leverages the ubiquitous mobile devices to boost conventional teaching methods with contextual teaching-learning. With VISTA, contextual teaching does not require any specialized device, expensive sensors, or simulated environment. To assess the applicability of VISTA in computer science education, we gathered the responses and experiences from 42 computer science teachers teaching in various universities of India. The responses garnered indicate that contextualization through VISTA is relevant as well as interesting. In total, 86.31% of the teachers found the contextual information provided by VISTA to be significantly related to both the captured images and the concepts presented in the class. These results encourage the use of VISTA as a pedagogical tool for contextual teaching.