"I Played a Song With the Help of a Magic Banana": Understanding Short-Term Learning Events

• In Event: Perspectives on Learning in Technology-Rich Settings

Abstract

Designers of learning experiences are concerned with how people learn across a range of timescales from a semester to a weekend to a single moment in time. And just as designing experiences at different timescales requires unique goals, tools, and processes, measuring what people learn from their interactions is also timescale-specific. The aim of our work is twofold: 1) To understand how learners describe their experiences with short-term, introductory maker experiences and; 2) To test a method for capturing learners’ experiences authentic to short-term learning. We find that learners primarily describe their learning as passive, though they also use active verbs and first person pronouns in documenting their learning and in a few cases engage in science talk.

Authors

• Jessie Marie Nixon, Utah State University

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Andy Stoiber, University of Wisconsin

• Zhaohui Dai, University of Wisconsin