Independent and Collaborative Play as Context for Science Inquiry

• In Event: Orchestrating Collaborative Play for Diverse Participation Across Contexts and Disciplines

Abstract

Purpose & Framework
Scientific inquiry is inherently collective (Ford, 2008) and therefore learning designs foregrounding collaborative play have the potential to support both learning about inquiry and learning science through inquiry. We explore a learning design that supports students as agentic and respected directors, both individually and collectively, of their own inquiry. Drawing on Vygotsky’s (1967) play, scientists’ imaginative embodiment (e.g., Ochs et al., 1996; Ogonowski, 2008), and ensemble learning (Vogelstein et. al., 2019), we examine how students play to learn about states of matter.

Methods
Data come from video-records of a project which draws on Mixed-Reality (MR) technology allowing students to become the phenomena under study. In the MR environment, students embodied microscopic water particles in a tracked space, exploring how their collaborative play created macroscopic states of matter displayed on the computer visualization (Figure 1). We present an interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) of one group of students from a combined 1st/2nd grade classroom as they directed peers in collaborative performances of being liquid.

Results
The MR visualization tool encouraged students to move from independent play to make discoveries (e.g., when you walk you turn blue) towards collaborative play to test and refine conjectures and explanations (e.g., “we could all” make a circle and then “move very slowly” [to make liquid]) (Authors, accepted). In this latter proposal, a student built on prior independent and collaborative play (independent, slow motion) to propose a collaborative performance to all make blue/liquid, a performance which subsequently was confirmed multiple times as successful for making blue/liquid (Figure 2). However, students were not satisfied with finding one adequate solution, and abandoned this established performance to do two more quick iterative cycles of independent play to create and test new collaborative performances (figure 2, right). Initially their teacher resisted their expanded inquiry and encouraged students to return to testing/confirming, but students persisted in their new explorations. This move illustrated students had come to understand drawing on independent play for exploration and collaborative play for enacting performances together. It also demonstrated students were pushing their inquiry away from testing/confirming towards expansive explorations of generalized rules for making liquid by making claims that “it’s working going slowly” followed by explorative play and collaborative proposals for slow jogging and tiptoeing. By eventually shifting to following students’ lead, teacher/researchers were able to support students’ continued direction of their own inquiry.

Significance
Student-directed inquiry within the MR environment allowed students to choose for themselves to move towards collaborative performances/play. Students navigated multiple inquiry cycles of play for exploration, collaborative performances for testing/confirming ways of making liquid, and quick iterative play-perform cycles while exploring generalized rules reflecting canonical science understanding. Our findings demonstrate the importance of seeing inquiry as interactional, allowing students to determine their own paths forward (Authors, 2019), and the strength of the MR environment for supporting students to navigate between independent and collaborative play as two critical means of exploring complex phenomena like states of matter.

Authors

• Danielle Keifert, University of North Texas

• Noel D. Enyedy, Vanderbilt University

• Chi XIAO, East China Normal University