Overview

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GreenDesigners ties in with the big vision of a sustainably designed future and recognizes that aspiring to achieve such targets requires a generation of innovative engineers and scientists well trained in implementing innovative sustainable solutions. In recent years, scholars have called for an integrated approach to sustainability education to address the current deficiencies in curricula on sustainable education. One response to this call is the recently introduced Next Generation Science Standards or NGSS (Lead States, 2013) that seeks to mobilize such integration with its introduction of Engineering Design as a core idea and a cross-cutting concept across school grade and college level Science. 

 

Employing the NGSS as its conceptual core, GreenDesigners presents an effort towards one such example of a technologically mediated, place-based learning design that coordinates the formal and informal teaching of Science, specifically Engineering Design.

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Study's Design

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GreenDesigners is driven by an Augmented Reality Learning (ARL) platform that enables a technologically mediated tour of Penn State’s solar house to help college and high school students (aged 15-20 yrs) learn about sustainable engineering design concepts. Students are guided to focus on specific engineering design concepts and to respond to assessments on a mobile app on their touch screens while observing the physical features of the solar house. This learning tour leads into a design challenge where students collaboratively create and present a prototype design solution.

 

 

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From the NGSS high school standards, the study focused on three NGSS Engineering Design standards, i.e. HS-ETS 1-1, HS-ETS1-2, and HS-ETS1-3. We used Mclennan's (2004) residential green methodology framework to adapt these standards for sustainable engineering design concepts (see Fig 2). These adapted standards were used to create and implement the digital resources, formative assessments, capstone design challenge and baseline testing materials that together form critical components of the design.

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In our data collection efforts during the Summer of 2017, college and high school students (15-20 yrs) interacted with the GreenDesigners’ app on handhelds while moving across the nine-acres of Penn State Sustainability Experience Center (SEC). Throughout the engagement of approx 3 hrs, they learned about engineering design concepts embedded in the sustainable technologies on site. This learning was supported by the technology-mediated assessments that in turn helped students in the group design challenge where they designed, rationalized, and presented design prototypes to make their learning visible.

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Research Method

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Methodologically, this study employs an exploratory approach to design based research (DBR), in keeping with which theoretically salient conjectures are generated and revised throughout the data collection and analyses. For this, conjecture mapping (adapted from Sandoval, 2014) was carried out through several design iterations that included usability studies and pilot-testing of embodiments (Fig 3).

 

For data collection and analysis, the study draws on the tradition of digital ethnography that lends itself to interaction analysis. Data sources in this investigation primarily comprised video recordings and open ended post interviews supported by statistical data from pre-and post tests, and analytics from the ARL platform.

 

Data was analyzed using multimodal interaction analysis where learner interactions were examined through the three pronged theoretical lens of 'place-embodiment-meaning making'. 

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The exploratory analyses supporting the findings were accomplished by: (1) creating a case of an AR driven learning experience called GreenDesigners with design-focused curricular elements of Engineering Design standards from the NGSS, (2) using the three-pronged theoretical lens of ‘place-embodiment-meaning making’ to examine learner interactions, and (3) investigating conceptual gains of the learners through the process frames of ‘analyze-design-evaluate’.

 

 

Findings

 

Findings revealed that learners coordinated their sensorimotor capacities (i.e., gaze, touch, speech, spatial positioning) and the technological content as a mutually constitutive strategy for design-focused STEM learning. Specifically, learners displayed recurring patterns, multimodal choices and moves as they interacted with design concepts, rationalized and negotiated design trade-offs, contributed design improvisations, and sought confirmation from their peers. It was also found that the NGSS curricular frames of ‘analyze-design-evaluate’ allowed learners to notice and uptake STEM design concepts and strategies that they later applied in co-creating prototypes in collaborative problem spaces.