Abstract
We present and analyze video data of upper secondary school students’ engagement with a computer-supported collaborative learning environment that enables them to explore astronomical phenomena (Keplerian motion). The students’ activities have an immersive and exploratory character, as students engage in open-ended inquiry and interact physically with the virtual environment displayed on an interactive whiteboard. The interplay of students’ playful exploration through physical engagement with the simulation environment, their attention to physics concepts and laws, and knowledge about the real planets orbiting the Sun presents an analytical challenge for the researcher and instructor encountering such complex learning environments. We argue that the framework of conceptual blending is particularly apt for dealing with the learning environment at hand, because it allows us to take into account the many diverse mental inputs that seem to shape the student activities described in the paper. We show how conceptual blending can be brought together with theoretical ideas concerned with embodied cognition and epistemology of physics, in order to provide researchers and instructors with a powerful lens for looking critically at immersive technology-supported learning environments.
Highlights
In this paper, we deal with a technology-supported learning activity in physics
To illustrate our choice of the input spaces, we give an example of a student activity and propose five ways of interpreting it, each interpretation corresponding to a different input space
We suggest that if the refinement of student epistemologies is one of the goals of instruction, the teacher should take on the task of unpacking the multiple-scope blend characteristic of this learning environment and help students disambiguate it in ways that reflect an expert physics epistemology
Summary
We deal with a technology-supported learning activity in physics. We study two small groups of upper secondary students as they engaged with an interactive whiteboardResearch in Science Education (2021) 51:235–275(IWB) to explore the mechanics of orbital motion and analyze their engagement through the theoretical lens of conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).The students used the IWB in combination with Algodoo—a 2-D simulation software that can serve as a Newtonian sandbox, allowing the user to draw objects in a virtual 2-D world; set their material properties, such as mass and bounciness; and construct virtual scenarios using these objects. We study two small groups of upper secondary students as they engaged with an interactive whiteboard. At the beginning of the activity that we study here, students were introduced to a virtual scenario in the form of a scaled-down model of a massive body interacting with other bodies via gravity. The Algodoo scene contained a large central object, which attracted other (typically smaller) objects that students could create themselves. It became clear very early that students interpreted the virtual scene as representing astronomical phenomena. The instructor present in the room gave each group of three students brief instructions: explore how smaller bodies move in the vicinity of a massive central body (quickly interpreted by students to represent the Sun). We attend to two groups of students engaging in exploration on the IWB
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