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Video Games and Simulations Bring Science to Life

March 10, 2011 | 6:25 PM | By

Northwestern University

Science textbooks might be gathering dust in some classrooms across the country, but that doesn’t mean students aren’t learning. Whether it’s determining if cell phone radiation is harmful or it’s using the premise of Space Invaders to calculate probabilities, some lucky students are using the latest high tech to learn science and theories.

As the public school infrastructure sorts out how informal learning through technology is going to fit into the system, individual teachers, principals, administrators, and education professionals are taking initiative to engage students in science, math, engineering and technology.

They gathered over the last two days at the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education conference to share their ideas and to inspire each other.

Here are just a few of the fascinating science, math, and tech experiments that bring concepts to life. Adapted from the CYTSE program.

  • STATS INVADERS! GAME PLAY AS HOMEWORK. A computer game called Stats Invaders (modeled on the classic arcade game Space Invaders) gives players basic intuitions about both sampling from probability distributions and the statistical hypothesis-testing process. Educator Dylan Arena of Stanford uses these intuitions in his formal instruction. In the game, players must shoot descending aliens according to one of two probability distributions, then decide which distribution the aliens are following. The effectiveness of the game was demonstrated in a previous laboratory study. in collaboration with Dan Schwartz and Lee Martin at U.C. Davis.
  • PHYSICS SIMULATIONS CREATE ANIMATED ENVIRONMENTS. Educator Patricia Loblein from Evergreen High School integrates interactive simulations into high school physics and chemistry. The PhET Project has developed more than 90 simulations for teaching and learning introductory physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences. These research-based simulations create animated, interactive, game-like environments designed to engage students in active thinking, encourage experimentation, and help develop visual and conceptual models of physical phenomena, emphasizing their connections to everyday life. With their flexible, open-exploratory nature, these simulations are commonly used from middle school through college level teaching. Best of all, they’re free, and can be run from the PhET website.
  • MOBILE APP TEACHES BIODIVERSITY. Green Hat & Engineering Pathway is an interactive mobile learning app that helps students learn about biodiversity and sustainability issues in their surroundings from experts’ points of view, before participating in unfamiliar debates about their familiar surroundings. Using the interactive location-sensitive map and video on a smart phone, GreenHat simulates how experts go about making observations in the field and encourages students to actively observe their environment. GreenHat uses infrastructure from Engineering Pathway, a K-Gray engineering education digital library, in how it searches, organizes, and curates learning resources in a mobile context. Presented by Alice Agogino, U.C. Berkeley, Kimiko Ryokai and Lora Oehlberg.
  • CONDUCTING RESEARCH THROUGH VIRTUAL LABS. High school students using the iLab Network (based at Northwestern University) access real instruments remotely using their web browser. Both the Radioactivity iLab and ICP-OES iLab provide students with the opportunity to collect and analyze real data using the multiple steps of the scientific method. Students integrate conventional chemistry, physics, biology, and environmental science concepts with experiments using high-end lab equipment that’s traditionally too costly for high schools to purchase. Check out the video below that describes the program.
FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, cytse, Games, STEM

Where Does Informal Learning Fit In?

March 10, 2011 | 12:24 PM | By

Flickr: Horia Varlan

With so much rich information for learners available and accessible on the Internet — everything from how to play the guitar to applications of the Pythagorean Theorem — how can the formal education system leverage all this within schools?

There are tremendous obstacles in the way. A shortage of high-quality K-12 STEM teachers, dwindling interest on the part of learners, inequalities in tech-enhanced opportunities, a fragmented research-and-development community, and outmoded high school and college facilities are just a few of the obstacles, according to Roy Pea, co-director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at the the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education conference to figure out strategies.

“There are many people in our society who simply don’t like the 21st century,” said Chris Dede.

But the huge cultural shift brought about by the Internet and Web 2.0 ethos — participatory culture, wikis, blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds, and new values around harnessing collective information — is helping ameliorate the challenges, and can be a crucial bridge.

“Every minute, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube,” Pea said. “There are 700 billion videos up, and many of them are about learning.”

It’s all part of the engagement question. How do you engage learners best? It shouldn’t just be about bright lights and activity; it should have a clear learning purpose, said Daniel Edelson. “We need to stay focused on the purpose of those activities,” he said.

Which begs the question: How do you measure engagement? How does this kind of informal, out-in-the-world learning connect to formal learning in schools?

“We don’t know what we need to about this,” Pea said. “Over 90 percent of research is done in formal environments. This area is unexplored.”

“We can’t give up on schools. They might not change, but we can’t give up,” Soloway said.

We’re comfortable with structured and guided learning environments with designed artifacts, like after-school clubs, organized sports, field trips to museums. But we don’t know anything about learning outside these confines, and the social ramifications of those learning experiences, he said.

“There are many people in our society who simply don’t like the 21st century,” added Chris Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University. “The only place they can pretend the 21st century hasn’t happened is in the school system.”

We have  along history of making ingenious things that aren’t used because we haven’t been able to convince the community — and many educators — about new models of teaching and learning, he said.

There are evolutionary, transformative, and disruptive ways to get to 21st century school system. “It will happen first in developing countries. They’ll leapfrog the current systems, and we need to be watching them and learning from them,” he said.

Elliot Soloway, founder of GoKnow, went so far as to predict that every student will have a mobile device within four years. “At some point, the schools are going to have to say, ‘Ok, you can use it.’”

“We can’t give up on schools. They might not change, but we can’t give up,” Soloway said.

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, cytse, informal learning, Technology in Schools

Tech and Learning: At Odds in School, in Sync Everywhere Else

March 9, 2011 | 2:58 PM | By

Getty

The culture of current public school model can’t be more different than the culture of technology, says Allan Collins, co-author of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.

In most public schools, every student learns the same things at the same time. The teacher is the content expert and controls what students learn. Testing is standardized and students learn by absorbing information about a variety of subjects.

“The elites in our society are buying educational advantages. We need to address these equity issues.”

Compare this to the culture of technology and Web 2.0. Students learn what they want, when they want. They have total control of their learning paths. They become experts in subjects they’re interested in by using a world of resources to help them learn. And rather than learning by absorbing information, they learn by doing.

“There are big incompatibilities between the culture of school and the culture of technology,” Collins said at the Cyberlearning for STEM Education conference today. “School will become less important as a venue for education. They’ll be with us, but when it comes to learning, a lot of people are learning what’s important to them outside school.”

Collins talked about some of the pitfalls he predicts will come about as a result of this chasm between in-school learning and informal, tech-driven learning.

“There will be real losses in equity,” he said. “Access rates to smartphones with minorities is high, but the elites in our society are buying educational advantages like tutoring and all the technology they need. We need to address these equity issues.”

The gains, however, won’t be insignificant: more engagement in learners, total customization of what they learn, and more responsibility will completely change the current paradigm in education.

Consider all the innovations that have come about as a result of YouTube, Google, the World of Warcraft, and mobile phones — just in the past few years. Have they had any impact on formal education, asked Richard Halverson, who co-authored Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.

“No. They’re all banned from schools,” he said. “This transformative power of technology has been used for consumer technologies. Schools didn’t stop evolving with technology, they went into a different direction. No Child Left Behind completely derailed the infrastructure in public schools.”

Though technology transformed the administrative end of education infrastructure, it hasn’t really made any impact in school-based learning.

“How malleable is the infrastructure that schools have developed to inform student learning?” Halverson asked. “Can we move from state standardized assessment to a formative process assessment? Is it flexible enough to support how we want to measure and support student learning?”

“The transformative power of technology has been used for consumer technologies.”

Compare social network sites like Fan Fiction, where people upload original stories and ask for reader comments and reviews. On the site, there are about 506,000 stories about Harry Potter right now. One particular story, Halverson said, received 624 reviews.

“Who’s the audience for a student’s homework?” Halverson asked. “Just the teacher. And we all know how hard it is to get students to comment on each others’ homework.”

Halverson imagined a scenario where kids used virtual tools that constructed peer communities that accounted for all variations of high school performance. “We need to think about how kids are organizing virtual experiences in which they do their work,” he said.

We need to bring together the expertise of the game design world, which perfectly exemplifies the best practices of learning, with the expertise of assessment experts, he said.

“I think the question is will [these new technologies] penetrate the parts of school that are least able to change?” he asked.

I interviewed both Collins and Halverson about their thoughts, and will post those videos in the next week or so. Lots of food for thought.

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, cytse, Technology in Schools

Creating Mobile Learning Apps Adds Another Layer to Learning

March 8, 2011 | 4:02 PM | By

I’ve written a lot about mobile learning – and there’s a lot more to write about because it’s a quickly growing and changing study.

But today at the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education Conference, I heard about the value of kids not just using mobile apps, but actually creating them.

Chris Thompson, Associate Director Evaluation & Technology, Georgia Tech, talked about the university’s Mobile Learning Laboratory (MoLLy). Thompson enumerated some of what kids learn while they’re creating apps:

- How to create media (animation, audio, video)

- Game design (different genres, set of rules and play, how to best engage users)

- Programming, user interface and instructional design

- Robotics (there are robots in mobile devices inside mobile phones, he says).

- Collaboration (working with other kids on the app)

- Critical thinking (identifying what’s most important and relevant in the game)

- Marketing and business practices as well as promoting and public speaking (how to sell it to the public)

- And last but definitely not least, they become mini-experts in the subject the app and game they’re creating.

Again, it goes back to the idea of how creating media makes learning a subject more relevant and interesting to the digital generation.

Read more about Thompson’s project.

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, cytse, Mobile Learning