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In large part due to the highly prescribed nature of the typical school day for children, efforts to design new interactions with technology have often focused on less-structured after-school clubs and other out-of-school environments. We argue that while the school day imposes serious restrictions, school routines can and should be opportunistically leveraged by designers and by youth. Specifically, wearable activity tracking devices open some new avenues for opportunistic collection of and reflection on data from the school day. To demonstrate this, we present two cases from an elementary statistics classroom unit we designed that intentionally integrated wearable activity trackers and childcreated data visualizations. The first case involves a group of students comparing favored recess activities to determine which was more physically demanding. The second case is of a student who took advantage of her knowledge of teachers' school day routines to test the reliability of a Fitbit activity tracker against a commercial mobile app.

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Xie, T. (2015). A world of information at their fingertips: College students' motivations and practices in their self-determined information seeking. AbstractPeople frequently engage in the process of "heutagogy" (i.e., self-determined learning). Unlike pedagogy and andragogy, heutagogy occurs without a structure or leader setting the context and directing the learning toward a specific goal. The lack of structure and the possible self-determination of topic, value, source, and trust in information led us to wonder about the motivations, goals, and processes considered by college students as they engage in self-determined learning. We conducted a survey with 83 American college students regarding their information-seeking preferences and behaviors. Some students reported accessing different media depending on what information they were seeking, while others sought multiple forms of information from the same media. Family and community influenced their trust in media, yet they also recognized experts and data as important justifications for credibility of media. We exposed some relationships among personal characteristics, perceptions of information, and self-determined learning activities. We conclude with implications and directions for future research.

In this paper, we describe a new approach for exploring individual participants' engagement in youth maker activities. Participants were outfitted with wearable first person point-of-view still-image cameras and wrist-based electrodermal sensors. The researchers analyzed the recorded electrodermal data stream for surges in skin conductivity and compared them with the corresponding photographs based on their time-stamp. In following with prior work, these surges were interpreted as moments of engagement. A comparison sample was created to look at moments that lacked this psychophysiological marker. Results indicated that the two participants had both shared and divergent engagement with activities such as soldering, assembling, and programming.

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Wearable technologies represent a rapidly expanding category of consumer information and communications technologies. From smartwatches to activity tracking devices, wearables are finding their way into many aspects of our lives, changing the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. The rapid adoption of these tools in everyday life hints at the possibilities these devices may hold in school and other educational settings. Drawing on examples taken from a five-year study using wearable fitness tracking devices in elementary and middle school classrooms, this paper presents two examples of how wearable devices can be appropriated for use in school settings. These examples focus on instances where students turned activity trackers into objects of inquiry using data from familiar activities.

Upon graduation, he co-founded Geotecnia de Colombia LLC., and worked as an engineering consultant for public and private agencies in Colombia and South America. Most recently he worked as external engineering consultant for the World Bank in Washington, D.C. After obtaining his M.S. degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2010, he began pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering with major in Geotechnical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is currently serving as a teaching fellow at the Bedford Village and Langston Hughes Elementary Schools under NYU-Poly's GK-12 program funded by NSF and CBSI consortium of donors. His experimental research interest is focused on the high strain rate behavior of sands including transparent soils and its application on modeling of rapid earth penetration. Mr. Ryan Francis Cain, PS 3 The Bedford Village School Ryan Cain teaches elementary science in Brooklyn, NY. Since 2010, he has served as a partner teacher in NYU-Poly's AMPS/CBSI GK-12 Fellows project.