Mike Tissenbaum

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Exploring goals, perspectives, and challenges.

This paper investigates the role of the physical classroom environment, coupled with a technology environment that includes real-time agents and data analytics, to support the orchestration of complex collaborative inquiry designs in a high school physics classroom. This design-based research contributes to the wider domain of scripting and orchest...

K-12 classroom settings are not yet incorporating emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, nor even touch surfaces, despite the significant impact that such media have made in many other aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, classroom environments have not generally evolved to support students in the new modes of collab...

COMPUTATIONAL ACTION, A new framing for computing education, proposes that while learning about computing, young people should also have opportunities to create with computing that have direct impact on their lives and their communities. In this Viewpoint, we outline two key dimensions of computational action-computational identity and digital empo...

Computer-aided simulation-based platforms have been shown to be effective tools for teaching STEM concepts. At the same time, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) platforms encourage different viewpoints and approaches from the learners which can enrich the learning experience in STEM classrooms. The deployment in recent years of networ...

This study explored the Idea Wall, a collaborative knowledge-building tool to support students’ collaboration in small groups during a plant biology science curriculum. We examined the affordances and challenges of the Idea Wall and found the effective use of the tool's spatial organization capabilities by students, particularly the Yup Zone and th...

The special issue is honouring Professor Dr. Heidi Schelhowe (1949–2021), whose research and perspectives have been foundational for the development of Computational Empowerment. Building on Schelhowe’s perspective, we included 8 international research articles in the special issue. These contributions showcase how current research in CCI is pushin...

Creating effective middle school STEM curricula requires a combination of individual and collaborative learning. Prior studies showed that finding a proper balance and providing uninterrupted knowledge transmission between different learning modes can be challenging in such mixed pedagogical approaches. In this paper, we present a multi-device inte...

As AI Technologies become more prevalent in the classroom, there has been an increased interest in teacher dashboards in fields such as computer science and the learning sciences. While extensive research has highlighted potential metrics of interest for teacher dashboards, little work has prioritized the interactivity of the teacher and dashboard...

This paper presents an implementation of Connected Spaces (CxS)—an ambient help seeking interface designed and developed for a project‐based computing classroom. We use actor network theory (ANT) to provide an underutilized posthumanist lens to understand the creation of collaborative connections in this Computational Action‐based implementation. P...

Classroom orchestration requires teachers to concurrently manage multiple activities across multiple social levels (individual, group, and class) and under various constraints. Real-time dashboards can support teachers; however, designing actionable dashboards is a huge challenge. This paper describes a participatory design study to identify and in...

With the current rising need for sustainability education, understanding the interconnected political, economic, ecological, and social systems that motivate (system level) change, can be uniquely addressed through immersive multiplayer games. Immersion through a mixed reality experience, face to face interactions, and game mechanics that push play...

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a growing field that has the potential to positively impact students' learning. A general consensus on the terms, practices, scaffolds, and assessments of HCD can foster its effective implementation in K-12 and post-secondary education. This session brings together researchers whose work is focused on implementing HCD...

This paper argues for a re‐examination of the nature and goals of broad computing education initiatives. Instead of starting with specific values or goals, we instead begin by considering various desired endpoints of computing instruction and then work backward to reason about what form learning activities might take and what are the underlying val...

A driving factor in designing interactive museum exhibits to support simultaneous users is that visitors learn from one another via observation and conversation. Researchers typically analyze such collaborative interactions among museumgoers through manual coding of live-or video-recorded exhibit use. We sought to determine how log data from an int...

In this paper, we present the motivation for, and design of, City Settlers, a participatory simulation. In City Settlers learners engage in collaborative embodied play, competition, and sensemaking within the domains of sustainability, environmental complex systems, and city building. Learners work in teams running separate but interconnected citie...

MIT App Inventor is an online platform designed to teach computational thinking concepts through development of mobile applications. Students create applications by dragging and dropping components into a design view and using a visual blocks language to program application behavior. In this chapter, we discuss (1) the history of the development of...

The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research - edited by Sally A. Fincher February 2019

This paper presents Connected Spaces (C-S) -- a tool designed to promote collaboration in makerspaces. It also describes a pilot study designed to test C-S's effectiveness in enabling people to seek help from peers. In our pilot, some (but not all) students were able to leverage C-S's affordances. We explore both supporting and mitigating factors,...

In this paper, we describe a tablet application designed around an interactive game-based science museum exhibit. It is aimed to help provide museum docents useful information about the visitors' actions, in a way that is actionable, and enables docents to provide assistance and prompts to visitors that are more meaningful, compared to what they ar...

There is a growing understanding of the unique ways that tabletops support effective collaboration; however, this research mostly focuses on environments in which learners work towards a single shared goal. Underpinning this perspective, either implicitly or explicitly, is the theory that collaborative learning is a process of attaining convergent...

Data logged within technology-based learning environments have the potential to support instructors' orchestration of learner activities. Whereas many learning environments now feature student and teacher dashboards, which promote reflection on activities after the fact, the affordances of displaying these data in real time is only beginning to be...

Data logged within technology-based learning environments have the potential to support instructors' orchestration of learner activities. Whereas many learning environments now feature student and teacher dashboards, which promote reflection on activities after the fact, the affordances of displaying these data in real time is only beginning to be...

The digital age has introduced a host of new challenges and opportunities for the learning sciences community. These challenges and opportunities are particularly abundant in multimodal learning analytics (MMLA), a research methodology that aims to extend work from Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA) to multimodal learning env...

There is increasing recognition amongst learning scie nces researchers of the critical role that the body plays in thinking and reasoning across contexts and across disciplines. This workshop brings ideas of embodied learning and embodied cognition to the design of instructional environments that engage learn ers in new ways of moving within, and a...

While here is ample research on how youth are connected in online spaces and how youth participate online via sharing and reviewing artifacts, yet less is known about how these social connections and contributions emerge, especially in the context of physical making and what can they contribute to learning and assessment. Thus, our symposium primar...

Research has shown that supporting tinkering and exploration promotes a wide range of STEM related literacies. However, the open-endedness of tinkering environments makes it difficult to know whether learners' exploration is productive or not. This is especially true in museum spaces, where dwell times are short and facilitators lack a history of e...

This chapter describes a 12-week physics curriculum that engaged students as a knowledge community across contexts: in their classroom, home, neighborhoods, and in the smart classroom. In order to support the curriculum intervention, we developed two complementary technology environments that are built on SAIL Smart Space (S3)-an open-source techno...

Interactive technologies like multi-touch tables enable museum exhibit designers to support visitors' learning with a wide range of resources (from multimedia to dynamic feedback to the presence of other visitors). Designers must decide, though, how best to align the affordances of these resources with the learning activities they are trying to sup...

Interactive technologies like multi-touch tables have enabled museum exhibit designers to support visitors' learning with a wide range of resources (from multimedia to dynamic feedback to the presence of other visitors). Designers must make decisions, though, concerning how best to align the affordances of these resources with the learning activiti...

This paper describes PLACE-a 12-week cross-contexts curriculum for grade 11 physics that engaged students at home, in class, in their neighbourhoods, and in a smart classroom setting. Using a design-based research approach we introduce a smart classroom infrastructure (SAIL Smart Space; S3) and investigate its role in supporting students in the cur...

Learners' physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and u...

This paper describes a doctoral research study that examines a 13-week high school physics curriculum that engaged students as a knowledge community that leveraged user-contributed content for a series of scripted inquiry tasks. The focus of the study was the smart classroom culminating activity, in which students were orchestrated in a real-time a...

This paper presents our research of a pedagogical model known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), focusing on our design of a technological infrastructure for the orchestration of the complex CSCL scripts that characterize KCI curricula. We first introduce the KCI model including some basic design principles, and describe its dependency on re...

This paper presents a design study of a collective inquiry model for high school Physics, where student-contributions are captured, aggregated, tagged and represented in a coherent visualization. We have developed a flexible technology layer that supports the aggregation of peer responses, including the collection of student explanations and semant...

This paper introduces a series of iterative designs that investigate how the aggregation and visualization of student-contributed work can support collaborative problem solving in the domain of physics. We investigate how new technologies can enable students to contribute to a shared knowledge base, working across contexts: in class, at home, and i...

Multi-touch tables, interactive whiteboards, motion sensitive interfaces, physical and tangible computers, all present enticing new functional affordances for learning. However, this constitutes a problem space for design, rather than any specific solution. What forms of learning can now be supported by a multi-user touch screen? How can such learn...

Interactive surfaces and spaces are entering classrooms and other learning settings. This symposium brings together leaders in the field to establish a coherent research agenda for interactive surfaces inside the learning sciences. We demonstrate the broad applicability of these technologies, outline advantages and disadvantages, present relevant a...

Research on scripting computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has recently received a lot of attention. However, most findings within this research grew out of studies focusing scripting online collaborative learning activities that often had an asynchronous nature and were conducted in artificial settings. This symposium includes an inter...

The work presented here is a product of a collaborative effort to develop a knowledge community and inquiry curriculum for elementary science, where students engage in extended investigations of simulated scientific phenomena presumed to occupy the physical space of their classrooms. By their immersive nature, these "embedded phenomena" lend themse...

This paper shares preliminary findings on a new program of research on collaborative learning in smart classrooms. Using a co-design method, researchers worked with high school teachers to create engaging curriculum activities that provided the context for two studies in math and physics. The activity designs aim to increase the depth of students'...

Repeated public surveys have found that people are increasingly concerned about their privacy when engaged in online activities [1]. In particular, people are concerned about how and when information is collected about them, and how that information is subsequently used. A number of strategies have been developed to assist individuals in protecting...

This new program of research explores how technology can enable smart classrooms where learning transcends traditional class boarders, engages students and teachers with Web 2.0 approaches, and supports a community of learners in developing knowledge. We report on key aspects of our open source smart classroom environment, including an online datab...

This new program of research explores how technology can enable smart classrooms where learning transcends traditional class boarders, engages students and teachers with Web 2.0 approaches, and supports a community of learners in developing knowledge. We report on key aspects of our open source smart classroom environment, including an online datab...

This paper describes the prototype development of the PIPWatch toolbar, a software interface device embedded within a Web browser designed to enable consumers to easily assess and compare the compliance of on-line businesses with Canadian private-sector privacy legislation - the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. (PIPEDA)...

We discuss the distinctive opportunities and challenges of adopting a PD approach to the development of 'Web 2.0' applications. Web-based services pose significant difficulties in interacting effectively with user groups in terms of traditional PD methods. However there are some quite popular 'peer-production' services which have been successful in...