The National Science Foundation-supported Science Through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) project is investigating how socio-dramatic play among elementary school students can help them understand scientific phenomena (e.g., the working of natural forces, complex behaviors of bees). STEP is instrumenting elementary school classrooms with REMAP and Open Perception‘s OpenPTrack as the interface between the students’ movements and media.
A collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Indiana University Bloomington’s Learning Sciences program, teams are conducting workshops with groups of elementary school students at schools throughout the Bloomington and Los Angeles areas, including UCLA Lab School on the UCLA campus.
Through role play, children explore and reflect upon the complex rules that govern the world, and in this project, they are asked to play roles in a natural system (e.g., bees in a beehive), and identify the rules that would make their role play match the workings of the natural system. The research focuses on the qualities of reflection and subsequent learning afforded by two aspects of such play: 1) When children interact to plan their role play (equivalent to modeling); 2) When they act out the system or phenomenon (equivalent to simulation), and then have a chance to examine their interactions. To understand the affordances and importance of embodied play, reflection and learning outcomes are also compared across conditions of acting out a system or phenomenon (1st person embodied simulation) and running a computer simulation of that same system or phenomenon (3rd person virtual simulation).
Noel Enyedy (Principal Investigator). Co-PIs: Jeff Burke, Joshua Danish and Fabian Wagmister.
STEP project website: http://sttep.org/.
Supported by NSF Grant No. IIS-1323767.
2013-present.