Discovering Students’ Measurement Challenges Within a Classroom Design Experiment Using Fitbit Trackers and High-Speed Cameras

• In Event: Poster Session 4
  In Poster Session: Advanced Technologies for Learning Poster Session

Abstract

This paper describes a second iteration classroom design experiment with fifth graders that incorporated two new technologies to help students explore human locomotion: Fitbit activity trackers and high-speed cameras. We describe a unit we designed and enacted in an intact classroom and then subsequently report on a challenge we discovered with respect to how students measured distances travelled across two separate time points using high-speed camera photographs as an information source. This difficulty appeared in both written class work and in post-instruction interviews with students. We explain this error in terms of Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual integration theory. Specifically, several students saw photographed events that should have been considered to be part of the same body movement as two separate ones.

Author

• Victor R. Lee, Utah State University