David Bar-El

Northwestern University | NU · Learning Science

While studies have indicated that teachers are increasingly accepting digital games as a teaching tool, the curricular design work of teachers toward integrating digital games into their teaching has remained relatively understudied. This study explores the learning activity designs of teachers who used the sandbox game Minecraft Education Edition....

Making and the ”maker movement” have been growing in popularity as a progressive educational approach. However, researchers have leveled critiques of making as being exclusionary towards people with disabilities. In this paper, we present results from the iterative design, implementation and evaluation of Inclusive Making, an undergraduate and grad...

Background and Context: Making is celebrated for bringing exciting tools and learning opportunities to non-traditional designers. However, people with disabilities may find themselves excluded from many making activities and makerspaces. This exclusion is present in making and computer science more broadly. Objective: We describe a university cours...

Digital games have long been of interest to Game Studies communities , but relatively few have examined how teachers design with and incorporate commercial digital games in their teaching in K-12 classrooms. In this paper, we examine a corpus of 627 online lesson plans designed for Minecraft Education Edition. First, we provide descriptive statisti...

As excitement for Minecraft continues to grow, we consider its potential to function as an engaging environment for practicing and studying spatial reasoning. To support this exposition, we describe a glimpse of our current analysis of spatial reasoning skills in Minecraft. Twenty university students participated in a laboratory study that asked th...

In recent years, researchers have focused on the design and implementation of maker activities across formal and informal settings. As a result, the research community is gradually articulating the challenges and design considerations relating to these settings. These include: tools, facilitation, and curricular requirements. In this paper we prese...

With millions of players worldwide, Minecraft has become a rich context for playing, socializing and learning for children. However, as is the case with many video games, players must rely heavily on vision to navigate and participate in the game. We present our Work-In-Progress on Tangicraft, a multimodal interface designed to empower visually imp...

In this paper, we propose that the artificial intelligence in education (AIED) community lead the charge in leveraging multimodal interfaces, in conjunction with artificial intelligence, to advance learning interfaces and experiences that are more inclusive. Recent years has seen the development of various multimodal technologies for capturing voic...

We study the experiences of high school student volunteers as mentors in a public makerspace for children. Based on interviews, we present the teenagers' varied backgrounds, doubts, and lessons learned. While most studies around maker activities have focused on learning of STEM subject matter, our findings point to an additional outcome, an empower...

Makerspaces of various models are forming all around the world. We present a model and case study of the Maketec, a public drop-in makerspace for children, run by teens. The Maketec model is designed to promote making and socializing opportunities for girls and boys of ages 9-14. It is based on three underlying principles: (1) "Low Floor/Wide Walls...