Joshua Danish

The Learning Physics through Play Project (LPP) engaged 6–8 year old students (n = 43) in a series of scientific investigations of Newtonian force and motion including a series of augmented reality activities. We outline the two design principles behind the LPP curriculum: 1) the use of socio-dramatic, embodied play in the form of participatory modeling to support inquiry; and 2) progressive symbolization within rich semiotic ecologies to help students construct meaning. We then present pre- and post-test results to show that young students were able to develop a conceptual understanding of force, net force, friction and two-dimensional motion after participating in the LPP curriculum. Finally, we present two case studies that illustrate the design principles in action. Taken together the cases show some of the strengths and challenges associated with using augmented reality, embodied play, and a student …

In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students' representational activities: the notions of meta‐representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first‐grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize results from interviews regarding the design choices that they made. Analysis of the semistructured pre‐ and postinterviews reveals that students attend to the content domain, local activity, and their personal preferences when evaluating representations. Analysis of video case studies that followed the students as they created their representations further reveals several key mediators of the students' representational activities, including other students, task constraints, the teacher, and local norms for what constituted a “good representation.” In addition, the data show that …

Research into students’ understanding of complex systems typically ignores young children because of misinterpretations of young children’s competencies. Furthermore, studies that do recognize young children’s competencies tend to focus on what children can do in isolation. As an alternative, we propose an approach to designing for young children that is grounded in the notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky 1978) and leverages Activity Theory to design learning environments. In order to highlight the benefits of this approach, we describe our process for using Activity Theory to inform the design of new software and curricula in a way that is productive for young children to learn concepts that we might have previously considered to be “developmentally inappropriate”. As an illuminative example, we then present a discussion of the design of the BeeSign simulation software and …

In vision-based augmented-reality (AR) environments, users view the physical world through a video feed or device that augments the display with a graphical or informational overlay. Our goal in this manuscript is to ask how and why these new technologies create opportunities for learning. We suggest that AR is uniquely positioned to support learning through its ability to support students in developing “conceptual blends”—which we propose extend beyond cognitive spaces to include the layering of multiple ideas and physical materials, often supplied by different conversation participants. We document one case study and trace how the narrative structure of a board game, the physical floor materials (e.g. linoleum), a student’s first-person embodied experiences, the third-person live camera feed, and the augmented-reality symbols become integrated in the activity. As a result, students’ conceptualization …

One approach to promoting successful engagement of underrepresented groups in mathematics classrooms is culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). However, it has been argued that CRP risks essentializing students or watering down academic content. We report our analysis of a case study of a group of three sixth-grade students who took part in a 6-week mathematics curriculum. This curriculum used geographical information system (GIS) maps to engage students in designing personally meaningful research projects while learning about measures of central tendency (i.e., learning statistics). The case study was chosen as representative of how students (47 total) in this urban classroom successfully navigated the curriculum. While successful, the intervention highlights the kinds of negotiations that students engaged in with each other, the teacher, and the curriculum as they coconstructed their own meaning of …

New technologies have enabled students to become active participants in computational simulations of dynamic and complex systems (called Participatory Simulations), providing a" first-person" perspective on complex systems. However, most existing Participatory Simulations have targeted older children, teens, and adults assuming that such concepts are too challenging for younger age groups. This paper, by contrast, presents a design for a Participatory Simulation, called BeeSim, which makes use of wearable computers and targets young children (7-8 years old) to model the behaviors of honeybee nectar collection. In our preliminary user studies, we found that BeeSim contributed to systems understanding and more easily managed group dynamics.

Although games—including board games, video games, and Massive Multiplayer Online Games—have garnered significant attention in recent years for their impact on educational outcomes, a primary focus of this interest is the transfer of knowledge from game to nongame settings. Building on this literature, our research explores how game designs that promote either competitive or collaborative play may lead to differential outcomes including dramatically different and social dynamics. Using video transcribed for speech and gesture, we developed a grounded coding scheme to compare the experiences of a group of 40 early elementary students engaged in a uniquely designed board game, called HIVEMIND, to teach advanced science content to young children ages 6 to 9, which were organized around either (a) individual or (b) collective play. Findings indicate that, in collaborative mode, players were …

We describe the design of the Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) project. In STEP, we explore the potential for dramatic play, a form of activity that is familiar to early elementary students, in promoting meaningful reflection about scientific content. We report on the first round of design experiments conducted with 18 second-grade students who explored states of matter within the STEP environment. Pre-post analyses indicate that the majority of students learned the content and demonstrate how the design promotes distinct forms of reflection. In particular, it appears that students attended to the projected simulation at key moments in play and then reflected on the underlying rules of the content.

A productive approach to studying the role of representations in supporting students’ learning of science content is to examine their actions from a practice perspective. The current study examines kindergarten and first‐grade students’ representational practices across a consistent context—the creation of storyboards—both before and after a curricular intervention in order to highlight those aspects of their practices that changed regardless of a superficially similar task. Analysis of the students’ storyboards reveals considerable improvement in the number of included features after the intervention. Analysis of the students’ practices as they changed over time is also presented by examining the students’ discourse, with a focus on their discussions of the science content and the representations themselves. We demonstrate an increase in accuracy and relevance of the features being discussed, as well as an increase …

Our paper builds on the construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky in Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978) to analyze the relationship between students’ answers and the help they receive as they construct them. We report on a secondary analysis of classroom and interview data that was collected with 1st and 2nd grade students completing a short scaffolded inquiry project designed to help them learn about how honeybees collect nectar. We explore how the progression of questions reveal students’ understanding of complex systems by examining how students’ progression through the questions tended to become more sophisticated as we increased support. We further compare two complex-systems perspectives, Component-Mechanism-Phenomena and agent-based approaches, to see how each would …

Engaging students in class is paramount if they are to gain a deep understanding of class content. Student engagement is manifested by attention to the various components of instruction. However, there is little research at the tertiary level focusing on what aspects of instruction are related to changes in student attention during class. To address this gap, we collected multiple streams of data that provide a measure of student attention during instruction. We had students in an organic chemistry course who wear hats with a camera mounted on the brim, to provide a record of student gaze (i.e. looking at the board, notes, and friends). We also had students who use electronic pens that allowed us to record what information students transferred into their notes (pencasts). Based on our initial results, we believe the data provided by the point-of-view cameras and electronic pens hold great promise for using these …

Research has shown that students respond to social expectations of interviews by engaging with the content in distinct ways that may or may not be productive. These structures of expectations with respect to knowledge are referred to as epistemological framing. In this study our goal is to introduce a systematic way to analyze student behaviors and describe how they cluster together to reflect different epistemological frames. In analyzing the data statistically, frames are regarded as a latent variable that accounts for the co-occurrence of behaviors. We use a computer clustering algorithm to systematically identify behavioral clusters in videotaped data of early elementary students that construct explanations of biological systems in semi-structured interviews. We also examine the relationship between these behavioral clusters and mechanistic reasoning as a way to investigate the importance of the inferences made based on these identified frames. Results show that there is a clear association between epistemological framing and student reasoning. By providing a statistical model of student framing, our approach can support the ongoing refinement of theory around epistemological frames and their impact on learning.

Since its inception as a field, the interdisciplinary nature of the Learning Sciences has led researchers to leverage, develop, and refine a wide variety of theories to better understand how to predict and support learning across diverse contexts. At the heart of this process has been a debate—sometimes implicit, and often quite explicit—between those who subscribe to so-called cognitive versus sociocultural theories of learning. Broadly speaking, cognitive theories focus on the mental processes of the individual learner, while sociocultural theories focus on the participation of learners in the social practices within a particular context. A number of well-known articles and chapters (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996; Greeno, 1997; Greeno & Engeström, 2014; Sfard, 1998) have addressed the differences between these two approaches, often highlighting the perceived strengths or weaknesses of one approach over the …

Researchers have increasingly demonstrated how technologies such as augmented reality (AR) can leverage embodiment within play to help students use physical movement to explore complex concepts. Using Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of play, we examine how two distinct AR environments—rule-based game play and open-ended modeling play—support 1st and 2nd graders’ inquiry (N=122) into how matter changes state at the level of microscopic particles. We further use the notion of keys (Goffman, 1974) to examine how the students construct distinct participation frameworks (Goodwin, 1993) within the two activity designs, and how this organization of activity may impact their learning experience. Our analyses show that students within a game-play environment were more oriented towards accomplishing a goal rather than understanding how a system works whereas those in the modeling-play group focused more explicitly on understanding mechanism and process.