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1. Infrastructure to support students exercising conceptual agency

   Nichols-Paez, I.; Brady, C. (November 2019, Proceedings of the forty-first annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Generative activities have been shown to support students to engage in space-creating play and exercise their conceptual agency to generate a mathematical space (e.g. Stroup et al. 2004), yet these studies implement generative activities only with their resonating counterpart, classroom networks, technological infrastructures that connect multiple, co-present students into a shared, digital representation. Because these technologies are in continuous redesign and still inaccessible to many classrooms, we need to understand the crucial features their infrastructure provides to the classroom system. By analyzing the strains on the classroom without classroom networks and how they relieved that pressure and revive the system, we found that the collective public displays provided students with a collective orientation and a sense of connection and individualism. 

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2. Understanding young children’s science learning through embodied communication within an MR environment

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-023-09395-z  

   Tu, Xintian; Danish, Joshua; Humburg, Megan; Zhou, Mengxi; Mathayas, Nitasha; Enyedy, Noel; Jen, Tessaly (July 2023, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning)

   Abstract While there is increased interest in using movement and embodiment to support learning due to the rise in theories of embodied cognition and learning, additional work needs to be done to explore how we can make sense of students collectively developing their understanding within a mixed-reality environment. In this paper, we explore embodied communication’s individual and collective functions as a way of seeing students’ learning through embodiment. We analyze data from a mixed-reality (MR) environment: Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) (Danish et al., International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 15:49–87, 2020), using descriptive statistics and interaction analysis to explore the role of gesture and movement in student classroom activities and their pre-and post-interviews. The results reveal that students appear to develop gestures for representing challenging concepts within the classroom and then use these gestures to help clarify their understanding within the interview context. We further explore how students collectively develop these gestures in the classroom, with a focus on their communicative acts, then provide a list of individual and collective functions that are supported by student gestures and embodiment within the STEP MR environment, and discuss the functions of each act. Finally, we illustrate the value of attending to these gestures for educators and designers interested in supporting embodied learning. 

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3. Building Mathematics Learning through Inquiry Using Student-Generated Data: Lessons Learned from Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycles

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13090919  

   Rakes, Christopher R.; Wesneski, Angela; Laws, Rebecca (September 2023, Education Sciences)

   This paper describes how plan-do-study-act cycles engaged a classroom mentor teacher and student teacher in a professional collaboration that resulted in two inquiry activities for high-school geometry classes. The PDSA cycles were carried out in four high school geometry classes, each with 30 to 35 students, in a mid-Atlantic urban school district in the U.S. The four geometry classes were co-taught by the second and third authors of this paper. The data consisted of classroom documents (e.g., activity prompts, tasks), classroom observations, student feedback about activities, and monthly PDSA reports. The PDSA cycles had a direct effect on the professional learning of the teachers. The resultant classroom activities used a data collection approach to engaging students in inquiry to learn about trigonometry functions and density. Student learning behaviors were noticeably improved during these activities compared with traditional mathematics instruction. We concluded that the data collection sequence provided an accessible entry point for students to begin scientific inquiry in mathematics. The process opened the conceptual space for students to develop curiosity about mathematical phenomena and to explore their own research questions. The use of culturally relevant topics was especially compelling to students, and the open-ended nature of these exploratory activities allowed students to see mathematics through their own cultural lenses. 

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4. Exploring Generative Models with Middle School Students

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445226  

   Ali, Safinah; DiPaola, Daniella; Lee, Irene; Hong, Jenna; Breazeal, Cynthia (May 2021, CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Applications of generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made their way to social media platforms that children frequently interact with. While GANs are associated with ethical implications pertaining to children, such as the generation of Deepfakes, there are negligible efforts to educate middle school children about generative AI. In this work, we present a generative models learning trajectory (LT), educational materials, and interactive activities for young learners with a focus on GANs, creation and application of machine-generated media, and its ethical implications. The activities were deployed in four online workshops with 72 students (grades 5-9). We found that these materials enabled children to gain an understanding of what generative models are, their technical components and potential applications, and benefits and harms, while reflecting on their ethical implications. Learning from our findings, we propose an improved learning trajectory for complex socio-technical systems. 

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5. Keeping Students Occupied with the Course Contents After Leaving the Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3341525.3393990  

   Fuad, Muztaba; Akbar, Monika; Zubov, Lynn (June 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE))

   Keeping students engaged with the course contents between classes is challenging. Although out-of-class activities are used to address this challenge, they have limited impacts on improving student's engagement outside the classroom because of the lack of real-time feedback and progress updates. For this reason, these types of activities are less appealing to the current generation of students who feel the pull of instant gratification more intensely. This paper presents a mobile learning system, named Dysgu, which enables students to work on their out-of-class activities, compare their progress with the rest of the class, and improve their self-efficacy. The goal of Dysgu is to better engage students with out-of-class activities and reduce procrastination in those activities. By using Dysgu, faculty can facilitate and monitor learning even after the students leave the classroom and intervene early when students fall behind their peers. 

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