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The Idea Wall is a collaborative technology that aims to support collective knowledge construction and idea negotiation across multiple social configurations. Further, to support multiple entry points for student collaboration, the Idea Wall provides (and requires) multiple modalities for interaction through text, collaborative discourse, and spatial orientation of ideas. To support the teacher in implementing and orchestrating Idea Wall activities, we designed: 1) an authoring portal to enable teachers to quickly create Idea Wall instances; 2) a whole class view to support whole class discussions; and 3) a set of real-time agents that can alert the teacher when students may need teacher intervention or new groupings based on natural language processing of students’ co-constructed ideas within the Idea Wall.
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This content will become publicly available on June 13, 2025
SimSnap: Supporting Knowledge Communities Across Individual, Small Group, and Whole Class Configurations
This study explored the Idea Wall, a collaborative knowledge-building tool to support students’ collaboration in small groups during a plant biology science curriculum. We examined the affordances and challenges of the Idea Wall and found the effective use of the tool's spatial organization capabilities by students, particularly the Yup Zone and the intermediary neutral spaces, for collaboratively organizing notes. But there's also a need for improvements in some features of the tool’s design and instructional guidance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2010357
- PAR ID:
- 10531493
- Editor(s):
- Clarke_Midura, J; Kollar, I; Gu, X; D’Angelo, C
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Society for the Learning Sciences
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 2543-0157
- ISBN:
- 979-8-9906980-1-7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/10591
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This study explored the Idea Wall, a collaborative knowledge-building tool to support students’ collaboration in small groups during a plant biology science curriculum. We examined the affordances and challenges of the Idea Wall and found the effective use of the tool's spatial organization capabilities by students, particularly the Yup Zone and the intermediary neutral spaces, for collaboratively organizing notes. But there's also a need for improvements in some features of the tool’s design and instructional guidance.more » « less
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We examined how Idea Wall, a collaboration spatially manipulable interactive note tool, supports collaborative scientific reasoning among students. Through a design-based research approach, the study also aims to identify potential improvements to the tool that can better support collaborative interactions. The Idea Wall has the ability to facilitate spatial manipulation and interactive note-taking supported student engagement and collaboration. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on the use of interactive tools to enhance scientific reasoning skills in collaborative learning environments. By researching the affordances and challenges of the tool, this study provides valuable insights into the design considerations and potential improvements of such tools in building new norms of collaborative discussion for a knowledge community.more » « less
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The effects of viscoelasticity have been shown to manifest themselves via symmetry breaking. In this investigation, we show a novel phenomenon that arises from this idea. We observe that when a dense sphere is rotated near a wall (the rotation being aligned with the wall-normal direction and gravity), it levitates to a fixed distance away from the wall. Since the shear is larger in the gap (between the sphere and the wall) than in the open side of the sphere, the shear-induced elastic stresses are thus asymmetric, resulting in a net elastic vertical force that balances the weight of the sphere. We conduct experiments, theoretical models and numerical simulations for rotating spheres of various sizes and densities in a Boger-type fluid. In the small-Deborah-number range, the results are collapsed into a universal trend by considering a dimensionless group of the ratio of elastic to gravitational forces.more » « less
