StoryGrid is a classroom-based design and presentation system for interactive multimedia posters. Employing the technology base first used in Eden's PitABoard, StoryGrid allows groups of learners to manipulate projected multimedia objects on a horizontal board using a small collection of shared physical tokens. In this paper, we present the ongoing design history of StoryGrid in the context of its introduction within an urban high school literature class. Interface modifications based on student and teacher feedback led on changes in token semantics and media importing methods. We describe how StoryGrid features enriched students' interpretations of literature, with particular emphasis in two areas: (1) attention to audience, and (2) reflection of multiple perspectives.

: RoomCast is a web-based learning resource distribution tool designed to support whole-class collective inquiry in multi-activity instructional units designs enacted on heterogeneous collections of personal and public devices in classrooms. As a design tool, RoomCast supports accommodation to local curricular adaptations and technology platform availability, enabling the configuration of curated learning and teaching resource collections over a broad range of classroom contexts. In the classroom, RoomCast offers rapid redistribution of resources during teacher-initiated activity transitions, automatically distributing tailored sets of resources needed for the activity to heterogeneous client portals. While informed by research in technology supports for orchestration, RoomCast is not intended as a scripting tool for complex activity sequences. Rather, it is designed to support coarse-grained activity structures involving diverse types of stakeholders, placing responsibility for detailed activity management in the hands of teachers or custom scripts, in pursuit of a descriptive framework accessible to practitioners.

This research investigates a novel approach to supporting classroom learning communities through the use of proxemic interaction and ambient visualizations. Specifically, community knowledge is embedded within the physical space of the classroom, with the aim of mediating opportunistic inter-group interactions, instigated through proximity and shared artifacts. This approach entails decomposing the community knowledge-base into a collection of independent thematic sub-stores, and then conceptually distributing those sub-stores to mapped, demarcated locations around the classroom, called "Knowledge Places." This necessitates physical movement among and proximity to those places in order for students to contribute to or otherwise access their peers' contributions to the emerging knowledge-base. The present research studies the materialization of Knowledge Places over the course of ten weeks within a sixth-grade life science curriculum, with topics of food webs and ecosystems.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 1837463, 1233722, 1441631, and 1556486.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 1837463, 1233722, 1441631, and 1556486.

Modeling is an important part of scientific practice that represents phenomenon but also allows for prediction and reasoning about systems. While students typically do not have issues with understanding simple linear relationships, difficulties arise when more complex relationships are introduced. Richer representational diagrams make visible the complexities within ecosystems and can help students better understand interacting forces. We co-designed an instructional sequence with software applications to support middle school students building interaction food webs as models of ecosystems. 48 students participated in the lessons and used the applications in groups of three to four students. 87% of groups were able to successfully produce an interaction food web. Posttests found that over 80% of students gave a completely or partially correct explanation, demonstrating reasonable proficiency in understanding interaction food webs. The results from each step of the instructional sequence are discussed with respect to the curriculum and technology design.

This paper reports on second and third iteration classroom trials of Common Knowledge (CK2 and CK3 respectively) – a pedagogical and technological innovation that supports teacher orchestration of inquiry discourse occurring in the digital CK environment and face-to-face in the classroom. CK facilitated the scaffolding of grade 5/6 students through phases of collaborative biodiversity (CK2) and astronomy (CK3) inquiry. Using tablets, students contributed to a community knowledge base that was publicly displayed on an interactive whiteboard (IWB). The IWB visualized the community’s idea flow, enabling learners to sort their ideas along socially-negotiated categories. Inquiry work done in the CK environment affected the knowledge work done in the face-to-face classroom discussions, and vice versa. We observed that teachers used an orchestration cycle of Reflect-Refocus-Release (3R) as a means of managing this blended learning environment. A comparison of teachers’ Reflect discourse structures between both iterations indicate such patterns vary with inquiry task demands.

This paper presents a new mobile software tool, PhotoMAT (Photo Management and Analysis Tool), and students’ experiences with this tool within a scaffolded curricular unit—Neighborhood Safari. PhotoMAT was designed to support learners’ investigations of backyard animal behavior and works with image sets obtained using fixed-position field cameras (“camera traps”) that capture “bursts” of images in response to motion. PhotoMAT was designed to help learners emulate two ways wildlife researchers use camera traps: documenting wildlife diversity via the relative frequency of appearances of different species, and exploring species’ behavior.

In this symposium we consider the physical space of the classroom in order to understand how location can be used as an input or information source for knowledgebuilding activities. Five posters encapsulate several projects, addressing the role of physical or locational elements within our work, including their role in the pedagogical design, the specific measures collected, and representations employed. The first two projects instrument the classroom with location-specific technologies (e.g., RFID tags), enabling learners to explore location-dependent phenomena (e.g., an earthquake zone, squirrel food patches). The third project maps classroom inquiry discourse (i.e., digital notes) to spatially meaningful locations though out the classroom for collective knowledge mapping. The fourth and fifth projects require learners to consider the physical properties of their learning environment in order to make decisions concerning where they will place motion-activated cameras for wildlife field investigations, allowing learners to instrument the learning environment themselves.

Designing tools for teachers to orchestrate computer supported collaborative learning activities in their classrooms requires that attention be paid to the range of roles and activities a teacher must take throughout the process. Drawing on the Implementing Collaborative Learning in the Classroom framework proposed by Kaendler, Wiedmann, Rummel and Spada (2014), the contributors to this symposium will speak to the way their designs address the various parts of this framework, allowing us to draw conclusions about what has been successful for different parts of this process, and identifying future directions for development and research.

We report on two learning environments where students used visual evidence (digital photographs) for the scientific practices of planning and argumentation. The first is a knowledge-building environment called Neighborhood Safari, where Grade 5/6 students (n=45) construct investigation plans concerning schoolyard wildlife; the second is an immersive simulation called EvoRoom/Zydeco, where Grade 11 students (n=51) capture observational evidence to support knowledge claims. We developed coding schemes to assess support levels (ranging from 0-4) provided by textual and visual evidence concerning (respectively) students’ (1) investigation plans for observing schoolyard wildlife with camera traps and (2) knowledge claims about climatic conditions in an immersive rainforest simulation. Textual evidence was found to provide greater support for the scientific practices of planning and argumentation than visual evidence. High-level visual evidence made connections to investigation plans and arguments, using (1) visual annotations (e.g., arrows), (2) comparison or contrasting images, (3) explanatory captions or (4) compositional techniques (e.g., cropping).

Learners’ physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and understand the relationships between their performances and target content—physics, health and fitness, data literacy and navigation, animal foraging, and climate change. The session will share findings and design principles from each of the studies around constructing technological scaffolds for physical performance reflections. The symposium highlights the various ways performance can be used to engage learners, and how different settings and learning goals affect the designs of performance representations.

The propagation of Inquiry Based Learning has lead to many more elementary students interacting with authentic scientific tools and practices. However, the more problematic realities of scientific data collection, such as noise and large data sets, are often deliberately hidden from students. Students will need to confront these realities and be able to make skillful data scoping decisions in order to make sense of ever more prevalent large datasets. We dub software designed to support these activities Information-Building Applications (IBAs). This paper presents the design considerations that went into building an exemplar IBA, PhotoMAT (Photo Management and Analysis Tool), a brief user study to show how the solutions enacted by following these principles are taken up by actual students, and a discussion of how the design considerations identified by our work might be applied to another IBA.

: Informal science institutions are depending more and more on dynamic, technology-enabled exhibits. These engaging firsthand experiences often need to be contextualized so that peripheral audiences are able to learn from them. We investigate how interpreters (a.k.a. docents, explainers) equipped with a tablet support tool (TST) are able to facilitate learning in a dynamic exhibit with high visitor traffic. This TST focused on re-representing user performance in the exhibit, and was designed to help interpreters shape visitor discourse and inquiry. Four cases are presented to illustrate how interpreters orchestrate their collaborative facilitation when a meditational tool is present, and how the epistemological role of TST shifts. We document interpreters successfully using TSTs to coordinate shifts in facilitation based on the state of the interactive exhibit, and using live data representations to connect visitors’ personal experiences with exhibit content, demonstrating several potential uses of TSTs as mediational tools for dynamic exhibits.

There is a need to teach core engineering concepts to elementary grade students. We present a novel approach using ‘deficient model’ i.e. a sub-optimal solution, to help students attend to design optimization and associated tradeoffs required to improve an engineering system. The nascent stage of this research prevents us from making conclusions. However, the framework highlights how distinct science education approaches can be synthesized and applied in the context of engineering education.