Does a Jump Count as a Step? A Case of a Productive Disciplinary Engagement With Recess Activities

• In Event: Immersive Learning via Playful Engagements With Physical Data

Abstract

In the fourth year’s iteration of a design research project involving intact classrooms obtaining and student examination of data from wearable activity tracking devices (Lee & Thomas, 2011; Lee, Drake, Cain, & Thayne, 2015; Lee, Drake, & Williamson, 2015), we observed and video-recorded three days of notably high student engagement and participation during extended classroom discussions centered around the following question: Does a jump count as a step? This discussion took place after inspection of recorded student movement data from their morning recess play activities as recorded by a wrist-based Fitbit Flex activity-tracking device. During these three days, students were enthusiastically generating suggestions for how to experimentally answer the above question, and they offered thoughtful and constructive critiques of different suggested experiments. They designed and ran two separate experiments and ultimately concluded that the Flex devices that they were using would generally count kids’ jumps as steps.
This episode, which is the focus of this presentation, is noteworthy because students were demonstrating productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) (Engle & Conant, 2002) through their discourse interactions. Key principles for establishing PDE were all manifested over the three recorded days; the subject matter had been problematized, the students were given authority to lead and conduct the investigation, students were held accountable for their claims and justifications, and there were a variety of relevant resources in play so that the discourse resembled that of meaningful design, critique, and interpretation of an actual experiment. Our contention is that these PDE took place so fluidly here because body movement data from recess was made an object of inspection. Recess, and how to think about it as a quantified activity, was an already familiar domain to the students and became contestable and subject to peer critique.
As we will argue, key to realization of PDE was the ability for recess to be reconstructed through individual testimonies because the play activities therein open to public view and discussion (both on the playground and in the classroom). For instance, a student could accurately claim they had played jump rope during all of their recess, but a fellow student could (and often did) comment that much of what happened during the game of jump rope involved standing in line and waiting for a very brief turn, thus opening up substantive discussion of whether “jumping rope” during recess was an appropriate test condition.
Taken as a case to join the nascent but growing literature on student learning with and through data about the self (e.g., Ching & Schaefer, 2015; Lyons, 2015; Taylor & Hall, 2013), this presentation serves to demonstrate that a powerful use of wearable sensors and self-data resides in its ability, under playful circumstances, to co-opt and manifest powerful design principles such as PDE to support sophisticated practices, such as experimental design and critique.

Authors

• Victor R. Lee, Utah State University

• Ryan Cain, Utah State University