This article focuses on understanding how games and immersive participatory simulations, with their focus on doing science, are becoming an emerging type of curricula for supporting science education. It discusses the theoretical frameworks positing that knowing is a contextual and participatory act. The context in which one learns any particular content shapes resultant understandings of that content. Moreover, knowledge and skills in science should be established as an inquiry process and that new technologies and design methodologies can facilitate this process.
In this article, we describe a preliminary study that integrates research on engineering design activities for K-12 students with work on microworlds as learning tools. Here, we extend these bodies of research by exploring whether - and how - authentic recreations of engineering practices can help students develop conceptual understanding of physics. We focus on the design-build-test (DBT) cycle used by professional engineers in simulation-based rapid modeling. In this experiment, middle-school students worked for 10 hr during a single weekend to solve engineering design challenges using
Parent-child 'everyday' conversations have been suggested as a source of children's early science learning (Ash, 2003; Callanan & Jipson, 2001). If such conversations are important then it would be pertinent to know whether children from different family backgrounds have different experiences talking about science in informal settings. We focus on the relation between parents' schooling and both their explanatory talk in science-related activities, and the styles of interaction they use with their children. Families from different schooling backgrounds within one underrepresented group in
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deborah SiegelJennifer EsterlyMaureen CallananRamser Wright
Two research studies sponsored by the Centre for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) investigated the programmes informal science institutions (ISIs) currently provide to support K-12 science education, particularly in the area of teacher professional development (PD). The first study was a large-scale survey with 475 ISIs responding about the programmes they offer schools and teachers beyond one-day field trips. A large majority of ISIs (73%) reported having one or more of these programmes, with more than one-half (59%) providing one or more forms of teacher PD. ISIs also reported a tendency
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Michelle PhillipsDoreen FinkelsteinSaundra Wever-Frerichs
This paper illustrates the intensified engagement that youth are having with digital technologies and introduces a framework for examining digital fluency – the competencies, new representational practices, design sensibilities, ownership, and strategic expertise that a learner gains or demonstrates by using digital tools to gather, design, evaluate, critique, synthesize, and develop digital media artifacts, communication messages, or other electronic expressions. A primary goal of this paper is to identify promising perspectives through which learning is conceptualized, and to share the
It is recognized widely that learning is a dynamic and idiosyncratic process of construction and reconstruction of concepts in response to new experiences. It is influenced by the learner's prior knowledge, motivation, and sociocultural context. This study investigated how year 11 and 12 physics students' metacognition influences the development of their conceptual understandings of kinematics. An interpretive case study approach was used to investigate students working in collaborative groups in the context of an amusement park physics program. The metacognitive character of individual
The museum visit is an important part of elementary school science teaching. However, a divide exists between teachers, who require curricular accountability, and museums, who emphasize free-choice exploration. Can a carefully constructed worksheet bridge this divide by providing free-choice exploration of curricular topics during the museum visit? In the present study, a theoretical framework was constructed to inform the design of worksheets as free-choice learning devices. This framework was used to analyze the design of an existing museum worksheet. Subsequently, curriculum-related
'The Breathing City' is an Arts & Science collaboration between Urban Meteorologist, Dr Janet Barlow (University of Reading); Designer Chris Rose (University of Brighton); and Composer Holger Zschenderlein (University of Brighton). It centres on developing multi-sensory perspectives based on the interpretation and representation of scientific data.
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Janet BarlowChris RoseHolger Zschenderlein
The drawing of 'outlines' can be shown to be dependent upon the bounding edge aspect of visual cognition, which is a principal means of discerning 'identity' from other features of experience in the visual field. Visual 'signatures' can be noticed when using techniques for the scientific visualization of data. Using examples from an ongoing art-science project between the Faculty of Arts and Architecture (Brighton) and the Meteorology Dept at the University of Reading, the paper will explore the boundary between the 'rational' and the subjective, and between the representation of knowledge and
In 2007, the Plant Genomics Program partnered with local artist Donna Billick, director of Billick Rock Art, to create ceramic mosaic murals on the exterior columns of UCD’s Robbins Hall to reflect the academic activities within. Resident groups include the Plant Genomics Program, the Weed Research and Information Center and the Agricultural Sustainability Institute. Billick, who has 35 years of experience in creating “community-build” public art, designed, fabricated and installed the five columns. Billick worked closely with artist Mark Rivera, elementary school students and teachers and UC
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University of California, DavisDonna Billick
The notion that science is unified in one way or another dates back at least to Aristotle, though unity claims since then have been diverse and va riously motivated. By way of introduction to the modern discussion of unity, disunity, and integration, in this first section we examine five historical attempts to unify knowledge: Aristotle’s metaphysical and hierarchical unity; the Enlightenment project of the French Encyclopedists; the systematic unity of Naturphilosophen Lorenz Oken; the methodological unity of the Vienna School’s Encyclopedia of Unified Science; and finally, the organizational
In this study our goal is to conduct a "connective ethnography" that focuses on how gaming expertise spreads across a network of youth at an after-school club that simultaneously participates in a multi-player virtual environment (MUVE). We draw on multiple sources of information: observations, interviews, video recordings, online tracking and chat data, and hundreds of hours of play in the virtual environment of Whyville ourselves. By focusing on one particular type of insider knowledge, called teleporting, we traced youth learning in a variety of online and offlien social contexts, both from