Lim, Kenneth Yang Teck

Engaging and understanding student-thinking in electrical circuit design can be challenging. While the analysis of circuits is an important component of an Analog Electronics course, one of the primary areas of difficulty faced by students is that they do not have a clear understanding of the current flow. Attempts at mediating this gap are usually limited to the use of metaphors and (too) much is left to the learners’ imagination. This paper reports an intervention co-designed with a lecturer with regard to an undergraduate module on Analog Electronics. The intervention was an open-source immersive virtual environment designed to afford representations of learner intuitions in electrical circuit design with a view to helping their tutor have a better understanding of the roots of their misconceptions. The paper highlights some of the benefits and challenges of using immersive environments and the design and development process, as well as the collaborative learning that resulted.

This paper describes the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Taking a multidisciplinary, citizen science and maker-centric approach, low-cost, bespoken wearables, such as a mini weather station and biometric wristband, were built. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, the instruments were first validated against research grade devices. Following this, a research experiment was created and conducted in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Data from this experiment were used to train machine learning models, which were then applied to interpret the relationships between the environment, health, and stress. It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. The results suggest that temperature and air quality play an important role in students’ physiological well-being, thus demonstrating the feasibility of understanding the extent of the effects of various microclimatic factors. This highlights the importance of thermal comfort and air ventilation in real-life applications to improve students’ well-being. We envision our work making a significant impact by showcasing the effectiveness and feasibility of inexpensive, self-designed wearable devices for tracking microclimate and electrodermal activity (EDA). The affordability of these wearables holds promising implications for scalability and encourages crowd-sourced citizen science in the relatively unexplored domain of microclimate’s influence on well-being. Embracing citizen science can then democratize learning and expedite rapid research advancements.

The paper attempts to bridge informal and formal learning by leveraging on affordance structures associated with informal environments to help learners develop social, cognitive, and metacognitive dispositions that can be applied to learning in classrooms. Most studies focus on either learning in formal or informal contexts, but this study seeks to link the two. The paper proposes three tenets to augment de-contextualized learning in schools by putting back the: (a) tacit, (b) social-collective, and (c) informal. This paper seeks to advance the argument for a consideration of how formal learning might be made more authentic by leveraging the affordances of informal learning. Two case examples are illustrated. The first case shows learners operating in a virtual environment in which—through the collaborative manipulation of terrain—adopt the epistemic frame of geomorphologists. The case seeks to illustrate how the tacit and social-collective dimensions from the virtual environment might be incorporated as part of the formal geography curriculum. In the second case, interactions between members of a school bowling team highlight the contextualized and authentic metacognitive demands placed on learners/bowlers, and how these demands are re-contextualized—through metacognitive brokering—to the formal curriculum. Productive linkages are made between informal and formal learnings and anchored through learners’ authentic experiences.

This paper describes an independent research study undertaken by a high school student under the mentorship of a Research Scientist at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. It explores how dialogic interactions on a given Mathematical topic, decimals, can be constrained in the remote learning platform Zoom. This research utilises Laurillard’s Conversational Framework for a small-scale intervention of two virtual learning sessions in Minecraft Education Edition, focusing on the decimal learning for primary school students. The study found that the overlapping of the immersive learning environment and remote learning platform engenders miscommunications, disorientation, and cognitive dissonance amongst both the teacher and the student, prolonging the discursive and adaptive phases in the dialogic interactions.

The recent phenomenon of maker culture has garnered the interest of educators as arguments have been advanced for the foregrounding of making in learning. Making in learning is an example of how participatory cultures of learning focus on authentic contexts outside of the formal spatial and temporal bounds of schooling. This chapter describes how a specialized school in Singapore made use of a curriculum design framework known as the Six Learnings (Lim,.Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2:4-11, 2009) because of its origins in contexts of learning such as games and immersive environments. The authors facilitated the process and based the design and principles of the learning space to articulate key dispositions in learners through the nurturing of a culture of making. Foundational to the activity was a commitment to reconceptualizing the emphasis on routine tasks and instructions that are typically present in a formal classroom setting.

ICT has been viewed as a tool to support curriculum re-design and teachers’ pedagogical beliefs shift from teacher-centred to student-centred. While schools are being equipped with varied array of ICT tools, ICT has not successfully brought the shift in pedagogies to student-centred models in many countries. As the use of ICT in education gains traction within formal education, teaching and learning are framed as two overlapping and interconnecting sets of processes— transfer and deepening. The two sets of processes are not operating independently, for they are mutually reinforcing and iteratively enhancing learning. To conclude, the paradigms of ‘craft’ and ‘industrial’ educator are introduced as a suggested means of lensing the role of teachers in ICT-mediated learning environments.