Connecting Space and Narrative in Culturally Responsive Making in ARIS with Indigenous Youth

Publications

Attending to issues of equity in making demands that we work closely with communities, focusing on what it is made, how it is made, for whom, and in what contexts. Rather than exploring making exclusively as a pathway to STEM learning, we examine how Indigenous youth learned about and documented community-based making using the Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) platform. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, we asked: (1) What did youth learn about makers, materials, and cultural meanings in their community? (2) What were the making processes of small groups of Native

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The Consume-Create Spectrum: Balancing Convenience and Computational Thinking in STEM Learning

Publications

Future school science standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), emphasize the integration of simulation and modeling activities in the classroom environment. The extremes of these activities have two vastly different implementations. On one hand, a teacher can have students experiment on a pre-made simulation associated with the material. On the other hand, students can use, for example, an end-user programming tool to create the simulation from scratch. This allows students to not only experiment on, but also, to model the real world phenomenon being studied, a key

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Weaving Computing into All Middle School Disciplines

Publications

In order to get students interested in computing, we teach middle school teachers of different disciplines programming with Alice and work with them on integrating computing into their discipline. Alice provides an interface for novices to create animations easily and quickly, which is attractive to and fun for students. We have been developing Alice curriculum materials for integrating computing into middle school disciplines for six years. Although our target audience is middle school, our materials are used by teachers from elementary school to introductory college level. This paper

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