Board 69: Integrating Computational Thinking, Engineering Design, and Environmental Science Through Smart Greenhouses

Jackson, David W.; Zhang, Baiyu; Barnett, Mike

doi:10.18260/1-2--32406

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

(15 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Teachers have long used gardens to support students in developing scientific knowledge and experimentation skills (Williams & Dixon, 2013). Learning with gardens can also support students in deepening their appreciation for nature (Montessori, 1912;Skelly & Zajicek, 1998), becoming an agent of transformation for systemic problems like food injustice (Madden, Wong, Vera Cruz, Olle, & Barnett, 2017), and creating automated systems using innovative technologies (Jackson, Zhang, & Barnett, 2019). For the workshop, we conjectured that teachers would discuss what and how to investigate the garden, considering broad question asking and ways for answering that explored the complexity of the garden.…”

Section: Materials and Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Luminous Science: Teachers Designing For and Developing Transdisciplinary Thinking and Learning

Finch

Moreno

Shapiro

2021

Cognition and Instruction

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Creating learning environments that integrate arts, sciences, and computing in education can improve learning in these disciplines. In particular, transdisciplinary integrations of these disciplines can lead to expansive alterations or dissolutions of epistemological, ideological, and methodological boundaries. We wish to support teachers in the creation of transdisciplinary learning environments that draw on art, science, and computing. We developed a classroom project genre, Luminous Science, that was designed to bridge disciplinary materialities, epistemologies, and representations through students' construction of computationally-rich representations of physical phenomena. We present a study of a multidisciplinary group of teachers co-designing a Luminous Science unit for their classrooms using sculptural lanterns with programmable media for both investigations and expressions of classroom gardens. We present a framework for examining what disciplinary understandings teachers drew on, how these ideas were utilized, and why they were brought together. We found teachers engaged in richly metarepresentational discussions wherein they applied values, epistemic criteria, and practices from all three constituent fields of study in their design work. We show how teachers developed units that simultaneously overlapped and diverged due to the pressures of navigating disciplinary and school structural challenges. Qualitative analysis of teacher discourse reveals how teachers liberated disciplinary boundaries, actively and critically explored synergies and tensions in disciplinary integration, and traversed goals that focused on both disciplinary improvement and holistic learning. Our study sheds light on how we can both study teachers who are designing for disciplinary integration and support them through professional development opportunities to encourage more transdisciplinary interactions that can expand what it means to do or teach art, science, and computing.

show abstract

Section: Materials and Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%