A Case Study of AR Technology and Engineering Students: Is There a Gender Gap? Diana Urbano 1(&) , Paulo Menezes 2 , Maria de Fátima Chouzal 1 , and Maria Teresa Restivo 1 1 LAETA-INEGI, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal {urbano,fchouzal,trestivo}@fe.up.pt 2 ISR, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal pm@deec.uc.pt Abstract. Determining the factors influencing students’ intention to use Aug- mented Reality (AR) allows a deeper understanding on how students react to the use of such technologies in their training as engineers. This study aims to identify the emotional and cognitive factors that influence the students’ intention of using AR in their future professional life and to access possible gender differences. A group of about 150 undergraduate students from an Engineering and Industrial Management program had the opportunity to explore AR appli- cations related to contents addressed in Sensors and Actuators course. A survey was designed and used with those students. Principal component analysis resulted in three components named interest, ease of use and attitude. Logistic regression analysis was conducted with these three components together with gender, as predictors of intention of using AR in later professional life. Attitude turned out to be the strongest predictor. This analysis has also shown that gender has no significant effect. Keywords: Augmented reality  Motivation  Intention to use  Gender gap 1 Introduction Educators always face the complicated question of which is the best way to motivate and communicate knowledge to students. Although as part of the learning process the students should develop the ability to understand abstract definitions and relationships, it is always necessary at some given point to help them establish connection with real world scenarios, situations, devices or objects. Augmented reality (AR) offers a clear opportunity to bring students to “try” the system, to “run” an experiment, to run experiment enriched by additional details and thus validate some learnt principles [1, 2]. AR may be used in a safer way as real world obstacles will still be seen by users, and virtual devices, system, or experiment elements may be ecologically integrated in lab, home, or factory environments where the training will take place [3–6]. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. E. Auer and D. May (Eds.): REV 2020, AISC 1231, pp. 330–337, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52575-0_27