Eye on Collaborative Creativity : Insights From Multiple-Person Mobile Gaze Tracking in the Context of Collaborative Design

Early Career WorkshopNon peer reviewe

Examining Informal Makerspace Learning Environments: Using Inquiry-based Learning to Facilitate Critical Thinking Skill Development

Makerspaces have emerged into the educational environment as a place to enable learners to develop needed 21st century learning skills (Bowler & Champange, 2016; Bevan, 2017). Learners need to develop critical thinking skills to enable success in an ever changing, more technologically fluent world. With the student-directed nature of a makerspace, pedagogies such as inquiry-based learning may allow for the promotion of critical thinking using questioning, reflection, analyzing data and expressing information to others (Lemley, Schumacher, & Vesey, 2014; Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014). Inquiry-based learning aligns with the 21st century skill of critical thinking as it is the ability to reflect, analyze and evaluate (Loes & Pascarella, 2017; Ventura et al., 2017); creating more emphasis on the potential value of a makerspace, the student-directed nature, and the fact that inquiry-based learning requires critical thinking about a topic. This qualitative case study research aims to investigate informal makerspaces that use inquiry-based learning pedagogies to determine if they, in fact, facilitate the goal of critical thinking development. Through semi-structured interviews with facilitators and instructors in informal makerspaces meaningful and informative insights were gained regarding this unique, informal learning environment; analysis of the data will deepen our understanding of makerspaces, particularly where inquiry-based learning pedagogy is utilized to achieve the goal of developing critical thinking skills

Using Project Based Learning to Engage Third -Fifth Grade Students in Robotics Education

Includes bibliographical references (pages 36-40)The purpose of this graduate project was to examine the engagement of third through fifth grade students using Lego?? robotics as the catalyst in project based learning. Robotics educations has been on the rise in the last 10 years, but in the elementary schools it has been the driving force for many teachers on how to engage students in todays??? technological advances. Using project based learning and Lego?? robotics creates an engaging environment for students and teachers to cover Common Core States Standards along with the Next Generation Science Standards. This project was created to help guide teachers, administrators and after school counselors with the materials and resources needed in order to start a robotics program at their own location

Abstraction in action: K-5 teachers' uses of levels of abstraction, particularly the design level, in teaching programming

Research indicates that understanding levels of abstraction (LOA) and being able to move between the levels is essential to programming success. For K-5 contexts LOA levels have been named: problem, design, code and running the code. In a qualitative exploratory study, five K-5 teachers were interviewed on their uses of LOA, particularly the design level, in teaching programming and other subjects. Using PCK elements to analyse responses, the teachers interviewed used design as an instructional strategy and for assessment. The teachers used design as an aide memoire and the expert teachers used design: as a contract for pair-programming; to work out what they needed to teach; for learners to annotate with code snippets (to transition across LOA); for learners to self-assess and to assess ‘do-ability’. The teachers used planning in teaching writing to scaffold learning and promote self-regulation revealing their insight in student understanding. One issue was of the teachers' knowledge of terms including algorithm and code; a concept of ‘emergent algorithms’ is proposed. Findings from the study suggest design helps learners learn to program in the same way that planning helps learners learn to write and that LOA, particularly the design level, may provide an accessible exemplar of abstraction in action. Further work is needed to verify whether the study's results are generalisable more widely

New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age

Traditionally in the United States, schools and after-school programs have played a promi-nent part in teaching young people about the arts. Arts education has been waning in K-12 public schools in recent times, however. This is especially true in low-income communities, where public schools have often cut back on arts instruction so they can devote limited public education dollars to subjects such as writing and math that are the focus of high-stakes standardized tests.When we look outside of school, however, we see a strikingly different landscape, one full of promise for engaging young people in artistic activity. What makes this landscape possible is an eagerness to explore that springs from youths' own creative passions -- what we call "interest-driven arts learning" -- combined with the power of digital technology.This report is a step in trying to understand the new territory. It gives a rundown of scholarship in the areas of arts and out-of-school-hours learning; offers a framework for thinking about interest-driven arts learning in a digital age; examines young people's media consumption; provides a survey of youths' creative endeavors online and elsewhere, along with a look at the proliferation of technologies that young people are using in the arts; and concludes with thoughts about challenges and possibilities for the futur

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs