Context | Goals | Solutions

Over the course of three months, going through a design process, our team developed a project to tackle the challenge we were presented in our Learning Technologies course during the spring semester. We worked in a team of two, both of interested in designing a project in science education.

We were presented with a challenge to design a learning experience with a digital technology component. All the other specification of the project were open-ended and based on our own interests and experience

Carolina, my colleague, and I were individually working on similar problems in our other classes: I was working on Hug Bug, while she was working on an experience for parents to expand their children's curiosity in nature. We decided to combine both of our interests and came up with "Telling Science"- a gamified application blending digital and physical interactions. The main aim of the application was to introduce the science of everyday life to kids by anchoring the experiences with meaningful digital stories. Student encounter real-life challenges in digital stories and solve them by engaging in science or engineering experiences at home or outdoors. App is designed in a way that it can be used at home settings either alone, with parents or friends for children in upper elementary and middle school.

The Learning Journey

To be able to understand the scientific concept and apply it to their real life, we wanted the learner to engage with the concept from several different perspectives thus being able to transfer their knowledge. To achieve that, we positioned different components in a structure of the storyline- a familiar concept to children. As you can see below, learners engage with the concept from different perspectives, starting from a story, engaging in the activities and wrapping up by “meeting a real life scientist” who went through a similar process and dealt with the concept themselves.
We also wanted the learner to be able to reflect on the process of solving the challenge, that is why we put a stress on them articulating their process and how they came to the solution.

App Components

Our target population was young learners. One of our takeaways from the research was that kids love stories and learning through them. We wanted to leverage this as science would be something new and foreign for the learners we, we needed a component that they already loved and enjoyed doing.

We wanted to base our experience on constructionist approaches, as we believe that learning happens best when you are learning by doing, engaging and exploring at the same time, and science and engineering themselves are hands on. We wanted learners to feel a sense of purpose while engaging in the activities to keep their engagement in the process so that not only do they not feel bored of purposeless while creating, but also look forward to the next project that they will be engaged in.

an important component of all stories are characters that learners can either identify with or aspire to be like. We wanted to leverage that and use the character for an important component in our learning process - the scaffolding. When engaging in making activities where learners learn while doing, it is essential to provide feedback and support throughout the process to make sure learners are not lost and the desired learning happens- we decided to give our scaffolding practice a "face" and turned it to a friend-companion for learners

One of our long-term goals was for the learners to get interested in STEM and engage in it professionally in future. We wanted learners to know throughout the experience that what they have been creating in their backyard with the help of "Quirky" is not extremely far away from the process real scientists go through. This would also help us create the link between the real world and the imaginative fictional world they are learning about science at.

Learning Agent

Meet your new friend - Quirky!

It was extremely important for us to support the learning process by providing help throughout the experiences to the learner as well as reassurance when they are on the right path. And what better way to do it than by providing a furry friend and a companion who would model behavior for the child, provide company, and explain the more challenging concepts in an easy way.

Research

The main framework our design is based on is thick Authenticity. See how each component of the theory is illustrated in the design of our product.

Other Guiding Theoretical Lenses

Besides basing our main design on the theory of thick authenticity, we drew from the following practices as well to make sure learning about science could be transferred to the everyday lives of the learner by using situated learning examples, helping learners develop strong mental models by giving them challenges to solve using the constructionism approach, and making sure those challenges are real-world and make sense to the learners making the process problem-based. To make the process of learning new things more comfortable, we made sure to insert cultural forms by involving components already familiar to the learners such as the storyline concept and everyday objects that they can interact with to solve the challenges from the stories.

Cueing/cultural forms

Tangible interactions with familiar materials help learners understand new concepts by seeing them with something they already know. In our case, stories play the role of cueing cultural forms as kids that age is familiar with storybooks.

Constructionism

Learners engage in the process and build their knowledge by constructing artifacts in real life that aim to solve problems in the digital storyline. The app also uses artifacts as technologies to help learners "Think with" and expand their understanding of STEM concepts.

Learn more about constructionism reading Papert and Resnick.

Problem-based

The stories frame an open-ended authentic problem that challenges children to go through the process of engineering a solution based on STEM concepts/methods. The problem will be introduced in stages giving learners a chance to identify critical steps that will lead them to the solution. Afterward, learners reflect on the process they went through and explain their understanding of it.

Critique

Support for mental model building: We relied on the learning agent Quirky to do most of the heavy lifting of feedback and supporting mental model building. I think this alone won't be enough as some experiences will need the immediate support of an adult. For the next iteration, I think, there could be a guide for adults that will guide them through the experiences and support the learners when needed
Offering invitations: I think this might have been one of the few projects, where we missed or did not think about invitations to the learning experience that much. Although the experience itself had many components that made sure learners would have fun learning, we did not think very well about how we would motivate learners to engage in the experience and choose this specific learning app instead of all the others.
Working on this project I learned that coming up with meaningful stories is challenging. After coming up with an overall structure of the application, we thought we were done, but we soon realized we needed at least an exemplary story that would illustrate and match all the criteria we had thought of. I think stories should have been developed through the design process from the start as well so they math and develop the application features as well.
What we had in mind regarding this project was working on the issue of students' perception of STEM subjects. That was the reason we decided to go with projects that will involve everyday situations and objects students deal with: We looked into the national science prerequisite later in the project when we had identified the theories we wanted to include. I think that our main constraint should have been the national standards in this case, after which we should have identified and chosen theories based on them.
We did not have time to test a storyline for this project, as we came up with a story at the end of it. It would have been much developed if we tested the storyline with the components that we had developed in mind and seen whether they were sufficient to reach our goals for this project.

What I did well

Addressing variation among learners: We based our experience on many theories, one being constructionism, which gives learners hands-on experience learning. For this project, we made sure learners could spend most of the time creating with the scaffolding we provided. As we wanted to instill the mindset of engineering in the process as well, so that learners understand and get used to solving problems with different means, it also meant that learners could use their imagination and create what they really wanted without constraints.
Using learning technologies well: As this project was done during a technology course, we had to make sure the choice and usage of the learning technology were appropriate and supported learning. In this case, we were able to create the hybrid experience, where learners could spend time outside and in their houses creating and solving problems, while also haveing this online support and learning platform where they could see and experience things they could not in reality.
For this project, I think that we drew on the theories pretty well. We were able to create components in the app that includes philosophies from the literature we chose.
The teamwork in this project was well done. We were able to create a project that drew on both of our interests and did mini critique sessions together to refine and develop the product we were working on
We managed to bring in our previous work. Both of us in the team had done work with the population of learners within the age range that this app is for previously. We were able to draw on the same research in this project and further develop it.

What I learned

Technology is always a tool: For this project, we first started looking into technologies that we were going to use to achieve a particular goal. We soon realized that the approach we took did not help us as we were lost and did not know what we wanted our population to learn.
I learned that sometimes it is better to start from scratch than develop a faulty design. Connected to the point above, we soon realized that we were going in the wrong direction concentrating on the technology and after weeks of work, we decided to step back and go back to learning objectives.
This brings me to my third takeaway: Designing for learning puts learning objectives as a base for any design. We were able to advance in this project by deciding what we wanted to tackle and what technologies that could help us in the process.

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