“People Who Walk to School Have a Big Advantage”: Physical Sensor Immersion in Life-Wide and Life-Deep Contexts

• In Event: Of Bodies and Minds: Immersive Physical Sensor Technologies and STEM Learning

Abstract

Researchers in the learning sciences have been arguing for more than a decade that wearable, mobile technologies have the potential to bridge gaps between in-school and out-of-school learning, as learners carry these technologies with them back and forth between the classroom and the various other settings of their lives (e.g., Norris & Soloway, 2004; Pea & Maldonado, 2006; Squire, 2009; White, Booker, Ching, & Martin, 2011). Prevailing approaches that seek to connect learners’ out-of-school lives with their in-school learning via such devices may have as a stated goal for learners to see their world from the perspective of some academic domain, often by using camera-phones or probe-sensors to collect data in their homes and neighborhoods and then tag these data as relating to, for example, environmental sciences (Evans, 2012; Maldonado & Pea, 2010) or measurement and mathematics (White & Martin, 2013). Such approaches rely on the assumptions that (a) some surroundings and practices are more relevant than others to the given domain, and (b) in order to actively capture and identify them, learners will realize such relevancies when they are encountered. These kinds of studies, however, often find difficulties with one or both of these assumptions when looking at effects on domain learning (e.g., Tatar, Roschelle, Vahey, & Penuel, 2003; Tunstall, Tapsell, & House, 2004).

Our approach is different. In this paper we report on our health education project, in which a goal is to have young adolescents become more aware of their own activity levels by wearing Fitbit™ physical activity monitors 24 hours a day (see Figure 1 in document version). When learners wear these sensors, data-recording is then immersed in all the life-wide and life-deep (Banks, Au, Ball, Bell, et al, 2007) contexts and practices of their everyday lives. In contrast to other approaches, in our project we begin from the assumptions that (a) everything is relevant, and (b) learners will begin to see patterns and connections in their data as it is passively collected by the wearable sensors.

Thirty-five young adolescents, ages 12-14, participated in our study located at an urban after-school program on the West Coast. Participants wore physical activity sensors on and off for a total of two months. This effort is part of a larger inquiry, wherein we are working with game designers to create a narrative-driven videogame that integrates pedometer data from these devices into the game mechanics and game narrative (Ching & Hunicke, 2013). For this presentation, however, we report on data from focus groups, interviews, and surveys we conducted with learners about their experiences wearing the Fitbits™, paying particular attention to the kinds of activity patterns learners noticed and then tried to change (with varying degrees of success) in their daily lives. Emergent themes across these data reveal tensions between which activity-related features of their lives at school and at home learners found they could alter, and where they found themselves constrained by circumstances beyond their control.

Author

• Cynthia Carter Ching, University of California - Davis