ABSTRACT Traditional lecture-centered approaches alone are inadequate for preparing students for the challenges of creative problem solving in the STEM disciplines. As an alternative, learnercentered and other high-impact pedagogies are gaining prominence. The Wabash College 3D Printing and Fabrication Center (3D-PFC) supports several initiatives on campus, but one of the most successful is a computer-aided design (CAD) and fabrication-based undergraduate research internship program. The first cohort of four students participated in an eight-week program during the summer of 2015. A second group of the four students was successfully recruited to participate the following summer. This intensive materials science research experience challenged students to employ digital design and fabrication in the design, testing, and construction of inexpensive scientific instrumentation for use in introductory STEM courses at Wabash College. The student research interns ultimately produced a variety of successful new designs that could be produced for less than $25 per device and successfully detect analytes of interest down to concentrations in the parts per million (ppm) range. These student-produced instruments have enabled innovations in the way introductory instrumental analysis is taught on campus. Beyond summer work, the 3D-PFC staffed student interns during the academic year, where they collaborated on various cross-disciplinary projects with students and faculty from departments such as mathematics, physics, biology, rhetoric, history, classics, and English. Thus far, the student work has led to three campus presentations, four presentations at national professional conferences, and three peer-reviewed publications. The following report highlights initial progress as well as preliminary assessment findings.
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Bugs as a Nexus for Emergent Peer Collaborations: Contextual and Classroom Supports for Solving Problems in Electronic Textiles.
Few studies have examined the role of failure in more open-ended situations where problems develop as a consequence of designing projects and where collaborations can emerge as an outgrowth of debugging said problems. In this paper, we explore the peer-to-peer collaborations that emerge spontaneously in the context of coding, crafting and design bugs within open-ended design activities, specifically an electronic textiles unit for secondary students taught over 10-12 weeks in introductory computer science classes. Examining observations from three introductory computer science classrooms, we address the following research questions: (1) How and what kinds of peer-to-peer collaborations emerged in unstructured ways, especially around bugs in open-ended projects? and (2) What curricular, spatial, social, and teacher supports allowed these interactions to emerge and flourish? In the discussion, we consider implications for supporting similar types of emergent collaborative learning in open-ended computational making designs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1742140
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10101538
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- A Wide Lens: Combining Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Embedded Learning in Collaborative Settings, 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning,
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 472 - 479
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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