Middle Schoolers Modeling an Epidemic: From Square Dance to Code

• In Event: Thinking Across Representations: Designing to Leverage Material and Computational Investigations for Science Learning

Abstract

Objectives. As part of a project infusing computational thinking into middle grades science classrooms, a week-long unit on epidemics was developed (Author 2018; Author, 2019). Collaborative development with our cooperating teachers had determined that the unit would start with an unplugged day where core science concepts were introduced. First, students discussed viral infection, the role of proximity in transmission, and how to express in a logical statement how and when someone would become infected. This was then acted out through an embodied activity where students moved quasi-randomly square to square. On the proceeding days they took these ideas and experiences and translated it into a computational model using a block-based programming and simulation environment (NetsBlox; ISIS, 2018). Our goal was to investigate the cognitive and affective affordances provided students by exploring these scientific ideas, both in physical and virtual form, from both the teacher and student perspectives.

Theoretical framework. While the unplugged (Bell, Rosamond, & Casey, 2012) and agent-based modeling (Wilensky & Rand, 2015) pedagogical strategies developed within the computer science education community guided the curricular design, the activities’ cognitive and affective affordances were interpreted through a conceptual framework informed by theoretical work in embodied cognition (Fadjo et al., 2009; Shapiro, 2019) and multimodal representational reasoning (Jaipal, 2010; Siegel, 1995). This framework both helped us understand the specific affordances of the physical and virtual activities individually, but also the process of translating the scientific ideas from physical to virtual contexts.

Methods and data. The data for this study was analyzed as cases defined as classrooms/teachers over time, comparing implementations in classrooms as the teacher and researcher collaborators explored and iterated the curriculum over the course of two years of development. Classroom observations, teacher interviews, and artifacts of student work were used as the data for this analysis.

Results and significance. Overall, the use of physical and virtual representations provided an opportunity for most of the students to meaningfully engage in scientific meaning-making. We believe each of the modalities provides unique affordances to both affectively and cognitively engage students. The initial classroom discussion provided the foundational language used to discuss epidemics while the formation of logical statements gave a bridge to both the initial pseudocode and later block-based programming representing the infection process. The “square dance of infection” was, interestingly, well received by both the students and teachers. The active physical movement engaged students who normally were not as involved in classroom discourse while giving all students an opportunity to rehearse the scientific rules in an embodied fashion. The block-based code, once assembled, was represented in a 2-D animation of sprites that provided a nearly homologous representation of their physical classroom enactment, and provided an opportunity to compare the enactment of their code against their physical enactment. Findings from this design-based implementation research project has implications for how two popular CS education pedagogical strategies—unplugged and agent-based modeling—can be informed by the theory and research on embodied cognition and multimodal representational reasoning.

Authors

• Eric N. Wiebe, North Carolina State University

• Danielle Cadieux Boulden, Code.org

• Madeline Hinckle, North Carolina State University

• Arif Rachmatullah, SRI International

• Teresa Leavens, North Carolina State University

• Nick Lytle

• Veronica Catete, North Carolina State University

• Tiffany Barnes