The Participatory Simulations Project explores how a new kind of collaborative learning environment, which is supported by small, wearable computers, can facilitate collaborative theory-building and lead to a richer understanding of scientific experimentation. In a Participatory Simulation, participants become "agents" in a full-scale simulation. Unlike previous work, Participatory Simulations combines the notion of a microworld with the affordances of real world experience. By involving a large number of people (typically between 15 and 30) in a "life-sized" experience, the project brings a microworld off of the computer screen and into the physical world. In particular, this study explored the use of a series of Participatory Simulations in a high school Biology class. The students became "agents" in a simulation of a disease infecting their community. The results of this project show that Participatory Simulations fully engage participants in the simulation, facilitate collaborative problem solving, provide a substrate for collaboratively designing and running experiments, and support the definition of new vocabulary to discuss the underlying rules of the simulation.

In many educational settings, manipulative materials (such as Cuisenaire Rods and Pattern Blocks) play an important role in children's learning, enabling children to explore mathematical and scientific concepts (such as number and shape) through direct manipulation of physical objects. Our group at de MJT Media Lab has developed a new generation of "digital manipulatives"-computationallyenhanced versions of traditional children's toys. These new manipulatives enable children to explore a new set of concepts (im particular, "systems concepts" such as feedback and emergence) that have previously been considered "too advanced" for children to learn. In this paper, we discuss four of our digital manipulatives-computationallyaugmented versions of blocks, beads, balls, and badges.

New technology developed at the MIT Media Laboratory enables students to become active participants in life-sized, computational simulations of dynamic systems. These Participatory Simulations provide an individual, "firstperson" perspective on the system, just as acting in Hamlet provides such a perspective on Shakespeare. Using our Thinking Tags, small, name-tag sized computers that communicate with each other via infrared, we add a thin layer of computation to participant's social interactions, transforming a group of people into participants in a dynamic simulation. Participants in these simulations get highly engaged in the activities and collaboratively study the underlying systemic model.

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