Supporting Situated STEM Learning

Abstract

Teaching programming is fast becoming a fundamental learning practice in schools for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects. Through interactive learning with tangible devices such as Lego Mindstorms, students and teachers can explore ways to collect data, analyse and illustrate core principles in STEM subjects. The majority of such educational programmable devices require the use of a PC to program them. This short paper reports on a development project that demonstrates a STEM situated and wireless method to enable students to learn programming. It allows students and teachers to create STEM experiments though only a Windows phone with TouchDevelop and a programmable device solution. This focuses their Constructionist learning applied to STEM learning when situated with programming capabilities via a Bluetooth based library to operate the UCL Engduino, a customised teaching apparatus based on the Arduino platform. We demonstrate a process for integrating teaching devices with TouchDevelop to expand on pedagogical techniques for both student programmers and educators in programming.