me | students | prospective students
Below is a list of some of my ongoing projects for which I am looking for bright and passionate new students to join in with the design, development, and research. If you are interested in joining my research team please email me.
Cross-Curriculum Representational Practices Project (CCRP): Students are constantly asked to create or interpret representations as part of their schoolwork. Representations might include drawings, diagrams, skits, and written stories. However, most of the work on representations is confined to one specific domain (e.g., looking at how students use graphs to understand physics). This is limiting in that it doesn’t allow researchers to truly understand the way that students view representations as similar or different across a variety of contexts and school subjects. The CCRP project aims to better understand the way that young students (1st and 2nd grade) learn with, about, and through the creation of representations by looking at how young students engage with them in different ways when they are in science, language arts, and art class.
BeeSign: Typically, young students are only taught about complex systems, such as honeybee hives, from a superficial perspective that focuses upon visual structures and easily described behaviors. However, understanding deeper principles such as the emergent properties of the bee hive, the role of feedback loops and job specialization, and the interdependence between the different bees and the flowers may help students to engage with more generative principles that will support them in learning other complex science concepts. This project aims to document the nuances of students’ understanding of complexity as well as the instructional strategies that help them to embrace these principles. The BeeSign curriculum includes a range of activities that I developed, including the BeeSign computer simulation software, to help the students engage with complexity from multiple perspectives.
Semiotic Pivots and Activity Spaces for Elementary Science (SPASES): Play is an important resource for young children. When engaged in play, young children are able to follow, articulate, and reflect upon rules that are otherwise difficult for them. SPASES uses computer-enhanced, embodied play as a means for children to uncover the hidden rules of the physical world. Using computer vision, Wii remotes, RFID tags, and other sensing technologies, this project aims to engage first and second grade students in learning the physics of force and motion. Desktop simulations have made force and motion accessible to middle school students. Our goal is to use students’ physical actions in the world as an interface to computer simulations to make these ideas accessible to even younger students.
