Paulo Blikstein

Columbia University | CU · Teachers College

Science education reform initiatives have been implemented worldwide in recent years focusing on the integration of science and engineering practices into science learning. In this context, one promising area to explore is how the resources provided by makerspaces can promote more meaningful, contextualized, and practice-based ways of teaching and...

Tecnologias digitais são empregadas cada vez em uma escala maior nos ambientes educacionais. Como resultado, empresas e grupos globalmente concentrados passam a fazer parte da vida das pessoas desde os primeiros dias da vida escolar. A maior parte desses produtos tecnológicos chegam à escola por contratos firmados por redes escolares em nome de tod...

Development of sustainable science education reforms requires transformation, and therefore involves integrative approaches that result from collaboration between researchers, teachers and policymakers. Using a DBIR approach, we developed a model for design and implementation of new science standards that addresses three main challenges identified...

What does it mean to become a village that learns? In this paper we document the transformative learning journey of a small Thai village over 24 years, becoming a community that identified, tackled, and iterated on problems, altering their everyday practices and lives. In that process the village shifted from a subsistence agricultural community st...

Automation has played a key role in improving the safety, accuracy, and efficiency of manufacturing and industrial processes and has the potential to greatly increase throughput in the life sciences. However, the lack of accessible entry-point automation hardware in life science research and STEM education hinders its widespread adoption and develo...

Durante a pandemia de covid-19, expressões como “ensino híbrido”, “educa- ção híbrida” e “aprendizagem híbrida” passaram a fazer parte do vocabulário de educadores, gestores, estudantes e famílias. Escolas e redes foram lançadas em um cenário confuso sobre o termo e sua relação com tecnologias educacio- nais. Tendo em vista a falta de clareza sobre...

Community-generated concepts, namely "germ cells," can be productive to address problem situations. Yet most literature on germ cells accounts for the initial development of concepts and how these create opportunities for learning and concrete application. This taps into only a small part of the potential power of a germ cell to be generative. In t...

With the rising demand for data skills across industries and disciplines, and the prevalence of data in all aspects and levels of our lives, it is critical to find new, more effective ways to develop students' data literacies. Stories can be an accessible way for students to personally connect to, and think critically about, data and its implicatio...

Research established that most learners perceive STEM learning environments as settings that exclude diverse ways of thinking. We investigate factors behind this trend in two sites that recently implemented fully-equipped makerspaces, but have deeply different socioeconomic contexts. We identify factors associated with increased self-efficacy and a...

The creation and distribution of disputable information is currently widespread and significant in the political debate. Explanations of this phenomenon usually imply that leaders exploit fragilities of their followers, such as lack of education or plain lack of understanding of the facts. We explore a competing interpretation: using a constructivi...

The ISLS has long been focusing on innovative learning that supports inclusive socio-emotional and collaborative practices, and more recent research has taken up political and ethical dimensions of human learning as central to design, practice, partnership and research. The society is also taking concrete steps towards structural changes in its own...

Freire had an intimate connection with liberation struggles in Africa. In this presentation, discussion will focus on how Freire's work including Pedagogy of the Oppressed was profoundly influenced by African intellectuals including Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. The talk will critically consider the contribution that Freire's work made to nationa...

The production and spread of misinformation are phenomena of rising interest, and scholars in many fields attempt to explain this issue. Indeed, studies shed light on mechanisms that affect the way we interpret reality and create systems of belief that may not be consistent with what is broadly accepted as factual. We investigate potential connecti...

Maker education stands out as an approach to STEM learning that has several benefits. However, despite the recent rise in its popularity, making in education may be excluding some groups of learners. In this poster, we report partial findings of a mixed-methods research project carried out in two high schools serving blue-collar, working-class fami...

Este relatório é fruto de uma parceria do D3e com o Todos Pela Educação e com o Transformative Learning Technology Laboratory, da Universidade de Columbia, nos Estados Unidos. O documento apresenta evidências e propostas para o debate nacio- nal sobre a importância da tecnologia para melhorar o aprendizado na educação básica. São utilizadas as dire...

Today’s debate about education is prone to focusing on system optimization, test score improvement, and budgetary concerns. However, education is much more: it is primarily about a vision for our societies. As we think about a new vision, it has to speak to the ethos of our time. Today’s youth are heavily focused on social change, addressing global...

This open access book contains observations, outlines, and analyses of educational robotics methodologies and activities, and developments in the field of educational robotics emerging from the findings presented at FabLearn Italy 2019, the international conference that brought together researchers, teachers, educators and practitioners to discuss...

Quando ripartiranno i processi di istruzione dopo l'emergenza COVID-19, come saranno le scuole? L'articolo discute le possibilità in due aree che possono aiutare ad immaginare l'apprendimento nel mondo post-pandemia: l'outdoor education e la maker education. La vasta letteratura scientifica sull'outdoor education ne mostra l'efficacia. Nel contesto...

Online learning is an important aspect of higher education today. One-third of college students take at least one course online, and almost 70% of chief academic leaders say that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy [1]. Despite the success and growth of online education, the number of courses that currently offer a hands-on labo...

O Movimento Maker tem sido observado pelas instituições educacionais, contribuindo para o crescente interesse pela implantação da educação maker tanto no ensino básico quanto no superior. No entanto, os exemplos dessa implantação mostram que as atividades maker não estão ainda integradas com o currículo, especialmente com as disciplinas de ciência,...

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) define "using and developing models" as an essential science and engineering practice. In a week-long science unit using the Bifocal Modeling approach, students perform hands-on experiments, design models and finally interact and compare real data with computational models. In this paper, we describe the...

This year on March 12, 2019, Mike Eisenberg passed away—an enormous loss for the learning arts and sciences community. A computer scientist by vocation, a writer with passionate insights, and a maker at heart, he was an endearing one of a kind. He spent his professional career at the University of Boulder in Colorado, where he established the Craft...

Purpose This research aims to explore how textual literacy and computational literacy can support each other and combine to create literacies with new critical possibilities. It describes the development of a Web application for interactive storytelling and analyzes how its use in a high-school classroom supported new rhetorical techniques and crit...

This paper examines tensions present in school-based makerspaces. We argue that, as maker education grows, particular attention needs to be paid to social interactions and discourses, in addition to space design, equipment, and curricula. We report the results of observations and interviews conducted in a recently adopted maker program in Californi...

Computer science is poised to become a core discipline in K12 education, however there are unresolved tensions between the definitions and purposes of computer science and public education. This study's goal is to explore how logistical and conceptual challenges emerge while designing a comprehensive K12 computer science program in a public school...

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

Cambridge Core - Education, History, Theory - The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research - edited by Sally A. Fincher

This is a research study of design and engineering classes that use a problem-based learning (PBL) approach in digital fabrication makerspaces in two middle schools. In these studies, teachers employ a PBL approach and provide an ill-structured problem scenario to facilitate design and engineering lessons in the FabLab (fabrication laboratory). Stu...

In this paper, we describe an experiment that compared the use of a Tangible User Interface (physical objects augmented with digital information) and a set of Contrasting Cases as a preparation for future learning. We carried out an experiment (N = 40) with a 2 × 2 design: the first factor compared traditional instruction (“Tell & Practice”) with a...

Transitioning students from arithmetic to algebraic thinking is a primary challenge in mathematics education. Visual patterns and physical manipulatives can be helpful, but students often struggle to see the connections between different representations. Manipul8 combines visual patterns with physical manipulatives and provides digital scaffolding...

As the importance of computational devices grows in today's technology-driven society, tools for teaching computational literacy are becoming more necessary. While microcontrollers have been shown to be an effective way to develop computational literacy in young learners, microcontrollers' accessibility is limited due to their cost. We present domi...

Learning to program is difficult for most children. Most of the interfaces designed to help children experience and understand programming are based on imperative programming. However, early exposure to functional programming have been found to have many benefits over imperative programming. We describe a tangible interface, Testudinata, that helps...

Research suggests that children with better social-emotional skills have greater academic success; but most schools still do not have a set social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum. 'Inside Out' is a three-part online tool for middle school classrooms that makes social-emotional learning accessible and supports teachers to track emotions and faci...

Manipulative environments play a fundamental role in inquiry-based science learning, yet how they impact learning is not fully understood. In a series of two studies, we develop the argument that manipulative environments (MEs) influence the kind of inquiry behaviors students engage in, and that this influence realizes through the affordances of ME...

Edith Ackermann was one of the most important scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Child-Computer Interaction. Trained as a developmental psychologist and having worked with Jean Piaget in Switzerland, Ackermann went to MIT in 1985 to join an intrepid group of researchers led by Seymour Papert who were trying to understand how extant theories...

The Bifocal Modelling Framework (BMF) is an approach for science learning which links students’ physical experimentation with computer modelling in real time, focusing on the comparison of the two media. In this paper, we explore how a Bifocal Modelling implementation supported learning outcomes related to both content and metamodeling knowledge, f...

How might we empower anyone to create anything? Designers may dream of whimsical ideas, and then turn these ideas into physical prototypes. Armed with duct-tape, cardboard and illusion, “Wizard of Oz” prototypes may communicate the essence of an idea using only raw materials found in every household. However, for electronic prototyping, the tools n...

This paper presents three multimodal learning analytic approaches from a hands-on learning activity. We use video, audio, gesture and bio-physiology data from a two-condition study (N = 20), to identify correlations between the multimodal data, experimental condition, and two learning outcomes: design quality and learning. The three approaches inco...

This study focuses on the two main design approaches applied to the guidance of student product development during capstone design courses through a comparison of two major approaches: traditional design process (TDP) and design thinking (DT). The objective of this paper is to discuss the impact of these design approaches on student activities, out...

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other national frameworks are calling for much more sophisticated approaches to STEM education, centered around the integration of complex experimentation (including real labs, not just simulations), data collection and analysis, modeling, and data-driven argumentation, i.e., students can behave like...

Understanding the relationship between human behavior and environmental impact is an important challenge for young learners. Children can benefit from learning experiences that enable them to actively consider and negotiate the complex tradeoffs that inform global issues. To address this challenge, we propose Cool Cities: a tangible user interface...

Haptic force feedback systems are unique in their ability to dynamically render physical representations. Although haptic devices have shown promise for supporting learning, prior work mainly describes results of haptic-supported learning without identifying underlying learning mechanisms. To this end, we designed a haptic-supported learning enviro...

We propose structural parallels between textual literacy and computational literacy, and explore interactive fiction as a medium at their intersection. We designed and built a web application allowing students to read and write interactive fiction and a curriculum weaving the two literacies together. A study evaluating the curriculum found modest a...

High school students often struggle to find the motivation to learn to program. Music can be a powerful motivator for these students, but existing tools that combine music production with programming often fail to meaningfully engage students with core computer science concepts. Sonification Blocks was created to shift the focus back toward big ide...

Amid today's explosion of cheap and abundant tools for Physical Computing, there is a serious neglect of design for learnability. This issue is especially important when Physical Computing is not used mainly to teach engineering skills but to foster creativity and innovation. This empirical study presents a design case study that took place while w...

Sociocultural theories of learning regard oral storytelling as a fundamental step towards literacy development. Collaborative play can lead to richer and sustained stories among children of young age. We describe an interactive learning environment called The Conference of the Birds (CoB). By allowing two users to interact with the interface at the...

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other national frameworks are calling for much more sophisticated approaches to STEM education, centered around the integration of complex experimentation (including real labs, not just simulations), data collection and analysis, modeling, and data-driven argumentation, i.e., students can behave like...

National guidelines advocate for a more sophisticated STEM education that integrates complex and authentic scientific practices, e.g., experimentation, data collection, data analysis, and modeling. How to achieve that is currently unclear for both presential and distance education. We recently developed a scalable cloud lab that enables many online...

Technology is changing the way students interact with knowledge, and open-ended activities are one of the main types of tasks that students engage with in technology-rich environments. However, the amount of guidance needed to promote learning in these environments remains unknown. We explore this issue by focusing on the effects of step-by-step ve...

‘‘Making’’ represents an increasingly popular label for describing a form of engineering design. While making is growing in popularity, there are still open questions about the strategies that students are using in these activities. Assessing and improving learning in making/ engineering design contexts require that we have a better understanding o...

Background: As the maker movement is increasingly adopted into K-12 schools, students are developing new competences in exploration and fabrication technologies. This study assesses learning with these technologies in K-12 makerspaces and FabLabs. Purpose: Our study describes the iterative process of developing an assessment instrument for this new...

The maker movement in education has been a revolution in waiting for a century. It rests on conceptual and technological pillars that have been engendered in schools and research labs for decades, such as project-based learning, constructivism, and technological tools for “making things,” such as physical computing kits, programming languages for n...

A real-time interactive, fully automated, low-cost and scalable biology cloud experimentation platform could provide access to scientific experimentation for learners and researchers alike.

Capstone design courses aim to provide students with real-life, complex, and complete design experiences. Students typically work in teams to design solutions for problems presented by partners. Capstone design courses have been widely disseminated with positive results, and there is a sturdy body of literature on the subject. However, it has been...

The rapid dissemination of new technologies in schools is an opportunity for the popularization of the educational philosophies of two important theorists of education: Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire. Digital technologies enable diverse and innovative ways of working, expressing, and building. This chameleonesque adaptivity of computational media...

New high-frequency multimodal data collection technologies and machine learning analysis techniques could offer new insights into learning, especially when students have the opportunity to generate unique, personalized artifacts, such as computer programs, robots, and solutions engineering challenges. To date most of the work on learning analytics...

Can anyone make a smart device? Affordable sensors, actuators and novice microcomputer toolkits are the building blocks of the field we refer to as Creative Computing. With the growing maker movement, more tools are becoming available to novices, but there is little research into the usability evaluation of these toolkits. In this chapter, we discu...

In this paper we demonstrate an approach to supporting students' engagement in combined physical experimentation and virtual modeling. We present a study that utilizes a scientific inquiry framework which links students' physical experimentation with their use of computer modeling in real time, which we call "Bifocal Modeling." In the case of the B...

More and more schools are implementing "maker" spaces and using digital technology to support students' interest and learning in STEM fields. Little is known about schools' interactions with those type spaces and their impact in formal assessment. We describe the implementation of a FabLab@School (FL@S) and the interaction of teachers' and school a...

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...

Highlights: • We present an assessment tool for measuring aspects of design literacy. • Design and analysis of an open-ended survey item with wicked characteristics. • We assess student's stance towards inquiry as an aspect of design literacy. • We provide evidence for student's lack of a designerly stance toward inquiry. We present a tool for qua...

Haptic technology has the potential to expand and transform the ways that students can experience a variety of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics. Designing kinesthetic haptic devices for educational applications is challenging because of the competing objectives of using low-cost components, making the device robust enough to...

Design is a cyclical journey from creative ideas to concrete realizations of those ideas though prototyping. Designers today have increasing access to low-cost technology toolkits within the electronic and computational domain. However, for technical novices, including electronic components in prototypes can hamper the ability to create novel ideas...