Project: BeeSign and Participatory Modeling
This project involved the implementation of a 10 week science curriculum unit for kindergarten and first grade which was designed to:
- Examine students’ representational practices, and encourage students to be more reflective as they create representations in science.
- Teach students about the process of honeybees collecting nectar from the perspective of complex systems, focussing on concepts such as emergence and interdependence in order to better understand how young students engage with and learn these complicated concepts.
To support these goals, the curriculum included a new form of activity called participatory modeling. Participatory modeling is an activity in which students engage in acting out their current understanding of the content in a way that leverages their ability to communicate well with their peers to help them focus on refining their model of the concepts. In addition, I developed a computer simulation called BeeSign to help students examine and experiment with the simulated behavior of a honeybee hive as it collects nectar.
Check out the related publications.
