EvoBuild: Building Models of Evolutionary Change Using Individual-Level Behaviors

• In Event: Poster Session 6
  In Poster Session: Learning Sciences SIG Poster Session

Abstract

This study is part of a design project to develop a computational modeling unit, EvoBuild for middle school students to build models of microevolutionary change.
In the pilot study reported in this paper, we tested one activity from the unit in 3 seventh grade science classes. Video data of four pairs of students was analyzed. The findings suggest that building and debugging models was supported by a negotiation between students’ interpretations of the available primitives and their intuitive knowledge about the world. Moreover, the findings indicate that distributions of variations in a population served as a more productive anchor than averages in reasoning about evolutionary change.

Authors

• Aditi Wagh, Northwestern University

• Uri J. Wilensky, Northwestern University