energIze the Researcher-Practitioner Partnership: A Successful Collaboration to Design an Engaging Full-Body Collaborative Exhibit Around Energy

• In Event: Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships for Developing and Assessing Informal STEM Learning Experiences

Abstract

Objectives: Researchers at a large Midwestern US University had developed a prototype embodied learning game called energIze that two primary school students could use simultaneously to participate in body-based metaphors as a means to learning about energy (e.g., crouching down to contract a spring and increase potential energy). A science center on the US West Coast contacted this team to inquire about developing the prototype into a persistent exhibit at their museum. The university researchers and museum staff worked together to re-design the embodied interactions and develop an observational protocol for understanding the dyad dynamics and any effects on children’s learning.

Perspectives and Theoretical Framework: We felt that the energIze prototype and the physical representations of energy that it elicits was potentially well suited to a science center given that playful engagement with science ideas through bodily activity is common in these contexts (e.g., Rennie & McClafferty, 1996). Although a key component of the NGSS, research has shown that understanding basic energy concepts can be challenging for young learners (Driver, et al., 2013), but that they can benefit from developing “precursor models” of energy that align with scientific models (Koliopoulos, et al, 2009). Building from other successful attempts to create science models that learners can engage with using their bodies (Author, 2016; Johnson-Glenberg et al., 2014), and even engage with their bodies collaboratively (Enyedy et al. 2012), we sought to create a two-player embodied learning game suitable for “walk up” interaction at a science center.

Materials, Methods, and Data: energIze, built in Unity and facilitated using the Microsoft Kinect V2, is a two-player exploration of energy concepts (i.e., that energy is conserved and ways that it is transformed) where both learners use their bodies to control a single robot and attempts to guide it through an abandoned research station on a distant planet. The energy that each learner contributes to the robot’s task-at-hand is visualized, and the learners can “feel” the equivalence of energy transformations (e.g., using the energy that they stored in one task to perform an action on another task). In order for our RPP team to understand how visitors were using energIze and how it was influencing ideas about energy, we developed both observation and software log protocols. Our field observations were time-stamped to allow for cross-reference with the software logs and they tracked a learner’s interaction with energIze in terms of “episodes”, noting their gestures, verbal utterances, and other events of interest. Software logs were able to record more precise metrics such as game objectives achieved, time, and the intensity of the gestures that were performed by a particular player.

Results and Significance: Initial data collection using our protocols has shown science center visitors to engage for relatively long periods and they often invoke energy terms when talking about their play (e.g., “our moving propelled us forward and brought us energy”). The museum staff continues to observe visitors playing the game and have experimented with signage to help them quickly acclimate to the novel interaction scheme.

Authors

• Robb Lindgren, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• James P Planey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Kathryn Quigley, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California - Berkeley