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In this paper, a novel approach to engaging students in personal inquiry learning is described, whereby they carry out scientific investigations that are personally meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives. The learners are supported by software that guides the inquiry process, extending from the classroom into the school grounds, home, or outdoors. We report on a case study of personal inquiry learning with 28 high school students on the topic of healthy eating. An analysis of how the personal inquiry was enacted in the classroom and at home, based on issues identified from a study of interviews with the students and their teacher is provided. The outcomes showed that learners were alerted to challenges associated with fieldwork and how they responded to the uncertainty and challenge of an open investigation. The study, moreover, raised an unexpected difficulty for researchers of finding the 'sweet spot' between scientifically objective but unengaging inquiry topics, and ones that are personally meaningful but potentially embarrassing. Implications for further research are shaped around ways of overcoming this difficulty.

The Personal Inquiry project is an investigation into the role that technologies can play in enabling effective inquiry. While it is generally agreed that inquiry-based learning has potential for student learning, especially in science, three main challenges remain. The first is to provide effective support for inquiry learning, for both students and teachers; the second is to be able to support inquiry learning across a range of contexts, including formal settings such as classrooms, and informal settings such as the home, and the final challenge is to support inquiries that engage the students. This paper addresses how inquiry-based activities for students and the teacher orchestration of such activities across time and contexts can be supported by technology using scripting. Personalization of the inquiries in terms of relevance and providing students with choice about the inquiries they carry out is an important part of the project's objective to engage students. A framework for the inquiry learning process is presented, and how this framework has influenced the design of the software nQuire is illustrated. Examples are drawn from trials with the software in several different settings with children working on science and geography investigations.

This paper explores the value of employing multiple modalities to facilitate science learning with technology. In particular, it is argued that when multiple modalities are employed, learners construct strong relations between physical movement and visual representations of motion. Body interactions with visual representations, enabled by interactive technologies, can encourage rhythmic cycles of engagement and reflection. A study was carried out to investigate how students interpret distance-time and velocity-time graphs created through hand movement. It explored the dynamic coupling between their body movements and graphs, and their subsequent interpretation and production of graphs on paper.The results show that physical manipulation of kinematics graphs has a significantly greater effect on students' ability to relate graphs to movement than observing the graphs being produced by someone else.

This paper describes the development of nQuire, a software application to guide personal inquiry learning. nQuire provides teacher support for authoring, orchestrating and monitoring inquiries as well as student support for carrying out, configuring and reviewing inquiries. nQuire allows inquiries to be scripted and configured in various ways, so that personally relevant, rather than off-the-shelf inquiries, can be created and used by teachers and students. nQuire incorporates an approach to specifying learning flow that provides flexible access to current inquiry activities without precluding access to other activities for review and orientation. Dependencies between activities are automatically handled, ensuring decisions made by the student or teacher are propagated through the inquiry. nQuire can be used to support inquiry activities across individual, group and class levels at different parts of the inquiry and offers a flexible, web-based approach that can incorporate different devices (smart phone, netbook, PC) and does not rely on constant connectivity.

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This paper presents and compares a variety of approaches that have been developed to guide the decision-making process in learning design. Together with the companion Learning Design Rashomon II (Prieto et al., 2013), devoted to existing tools to support the same process, it aims to provide a view on relevant research results in this field. The common thread followed in these two contributions is inspired by Kurosawa's Rashomon film, which takes multiple perspectives on the same action. Similarly, in this paper, Rashomon I, a lesson on ''Healthy Eating'' is analysed according to five different approaches, while the Rashomon II paper is used to exemplify the affordances of different tools. For this reason, this paper does not follow the conventional structure of research papers (research question, method, results and discussion), but rather it moves from an introduction providing the rationale for the paper, to a description of the five different approaches to learning design (the 4SPPIces Model, the 4Ts, the e-Design Template, the Design Principles Database and the Design Narrative) and then to a discussion of their similarities and differences to inform the choice of potential users.Keywords: learning design approaches; pedagogical planning; inquiry learning Introduction Over the last 12 years, the research field of learning design has attracted the attention of many researchers because of its promise to provide powerful scaffolds for pedagogically informed design of learning activities that make effective use of technology. Consequently, the recent evolution of this field has been lively and dynamic, and researchers and practitioners have followed different paths to meet a common need: improving the quality and facilitating the implementation of technology-enhanced

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