Ricarose Roque

The Simulation Cycle: Combining Games, Simulations, Engineering and Science Using StarLogo TNG

StarLogo The Next Generation (TNG) enables secondary school students and teachers to model decentralized systems through agent-based programming. TNGs inclusion of a three-dimensional graphical environment provides the capacity to create games and simulation models with a first-person perspective. The authors theorize that student learning of complex systems and simulations can be motivated and improved by transforming simulation models of complex systems phenomena (specifically this study examines systems including epidemics and Newtonian motion) into games. Through this transformation students interact with the model in new ways and increase their learning of both specific content knowledge and general processes such as inquiry, problem solving and creative thinking. During this study several methods for connecting the simulations to game dynamics were tried, ranging from student-created games, to altering existing games, to students playing premade games. This article presents the results of research data from two years of curriculum development and piloting in northern Massachusetts science classrooms to demonstrate the successes and challenges of integrating simulations and games. This article also explores the results of these interventions in terms of ease of implementation, student motivation and student learning.

From tools to communities: designs to support online creative collaboration in scratch

In this paper, we investigate the support of online creative collaborations among young programmers in Scratch. We designed and implemented two online collaboration events, the Collab Challenge and Collab Camp, implemented in January 2011 and in August 2011, respectively, in which members of the Scratch community were invited to work together on programming projects. This paper explores what we learned from iteratively designing and implementing the second event Collab Camp. In our analyses, we reflect on how the changes in context of collaboration (context), the opportunities for finding collaborators (connection), and the engagement of members in constructive feedback (critique) emerged as critical spaces supportive of online collaboration. We discuss how these spaces can serve as guiding principles for online communities that support young designers in creating expressive and personally meaningful projects together.

Supporting Diverse and Creative Collaboration in the Scratch Online Community

This chapter explores the diverse and creative collaboration in the Scratch online community, where young people can create and share interactive media such as animations, games, and stories with people all over the world. Scratch enables creative collaboration, with more than 130,000 youth each month participating to design, build, and invent shared artifacts. Since Scratch was launched in 2007, Scratch members have engaged in a wide variety of collaborative activities, which include building on each other’s projects, role-playing to imagine new worlds together, maintaining communities of interests, and coordinating large groups to produce sophisticated projects. We describe the varied and emergent collaborative activities through five stories, and we describe the ways in which youth are learning by designing, motivated by their interests and supported by community. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons we have learned to support these emergent and diverse activities.

Designing futures for peer-to-peer learning @ CSCW

Open, online learning environments, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open learning communities have been promoted as a way to expand equitable access to quality education. Such learning experiences are potentially enriched via extensive networks of peer learners. Even though challenges exist to realize these aspirations, open, online learning environments can serve as a mechanism for how we provide transformative learning experiences. This workshop aims to bring researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore how the body of CSCW knowledge can better support the vision of sustaining peer-to-peer learning in online environments. Integrating contributions from designers, researchers, and practitioners at the intersection of CSCW & education, participants will co-create future visions and proposed implementations for open, online learning environments.

CSCW and education: viewing education as a site of work practice

Educational institutions, whether they are formal or informal, present a work environment in which technology, and social and cultural interactions mediate unfolding work. The interaction between CSCW and the work of education can hold great potential for both improving the educational institutions as well as providing greater explanatory power to CSCW theories that support the work of groups and the designs that are instantiated in those theories. The goal of this workshop is to build a community interested in the intersection between CSCW and educational work practice.