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STEM integration holds significant promise for supporting students in making connections among ideas and ways of thinking that might otherwise remain “siloed.” Nevertheless, activities that integrate disciplines can present challenges to learners. In particular, they can require students to shift epistemological framing, demands that can be overlooked by designers and facilitators. We analyze how students in an 8th grade mathematics classroom reasoned about circles, across math and coding activities. One student showed evidence of shifting fluently between different frames as facilitators had expected. The dramatic change in his contributions gauge the demands of the activities, as do the contributions of other students, who appeared to work within different frames. Our findings have relevance for the design and facilitation of integrated STEM learning environments to support students in navigating such frame-shifts. 

This paper analyzes the computational practices that four 7th and 8th grade students engaged in when learning geometric transformations in two different online block-based programming environments. The data sources include video footage of students’ interviews in Zoom where they shared their screens and cameras. The findings determined that students utilized in particular, decomposition and pattern recognition as important computational thinking practices required for learning in STEM disciplines. The paper also describes the changes made in how research method, data collection, and analysis configured opportunities to study computational thinking in remote locations due to the restrictions brought on by COVID-19. We identified three main challenges in the transition to online research: (a) recruiting research participants which included instituting necessary revisions to ethics protocols; (b) rethinking data gathering and analysis techniques along with interactions with participants in virtual settings; (c) dealing with glitches associated with technologies and virtual communication media in just-in-time ways. We conclude that even given the challenges with researching during COVID-19, there are still opportunities for rich, robust research in online settings. 

Participatory simulations of disease spread were conducted using wearable computers (badges). Participants interacted (simulating various forms of social network exchange) without knowing whether exchange partners were infected. Afterwards, the NetLogo modeling environment was used to visualize the network. In class discussion, the impact on the social group of different members being infected was explored. This balanced network growth dynamics with disease spread dynamics. 

Agent-based modelling (ABM) is a powerful approach for simulating complexity and for understanding the emergent phenomena core to multiple disciplines across the physical and social sciences (Wilensky, 2001). ABM is thus often understood as an innovation in STEM education, providing a representational infrastructure for understanding complexity by “growing it” (Epstein & Axtell, 1996; Wilensky & Papert, 2010). While this is certainly true, we argue that expressive and artistic uses of “swarms” of computational agents can also provide accessible entry points for learners and can support them in developing a range of intuitions about the kinds of phenomena that they might simulated with ABM. This offers a “STEAM” oriented introduction to modelling, connecting artistic perspectives with scientific perspectives in fundamental ways. In this paper we describe the iterative design and implementation of activities that highlight the expressive potential and social syntonicity (Brady et al, 2016) of one of the fundamental types of agent in the ABM toolkit (the “patches”). We describe a setting in which we have done design-based research over two years, in summer camps (entitled “Code Your Art”) and school-year activities involving rising fifth through eighth grade students (participants aged from 10-15) attending school in a mid-sized urban district in the southeastern USA with a high proportion of traditionally underserved and minoritized youth. 

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. 

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. 

This symposium aims to explore current research working toward conceptualizing and measuring productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) contextualized in diverse learning and project contexts. Disciplinary engagement is critical for fostering students’ deep, integrated understanding of STEM content and disciplinary practices. However, there are significant challenges to reaching this engagement quality, with CSCL environments providing opportunities and supports for engagement, but also posing challenges. This symposium aims to account for recent developments, as presenters showcase rich range in exploring application of PDE in diverse domains, grade bands, and learning contexts. The presentations also showcase a range of methods to analyze PDE as collective, situated, cross-contextual, dynamic, and generative. 

The design of most learning environments focuses on supporting students in making, constructing, and putting together projects on and off the screen, with much less attention paid to the many issues—problems, bugs, or traps—that students invariably encounter along the way. In this symposium, we present different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives on understanding how learners engage in debugging applications on and off screen, examine learners’ mindsets about debugging from middle school to college students and teachers, and present pedagogical approaches that promote strategies for debugging problems, even having learners themselves design problems for others. We contend that learning to identify and fix problems—debug, troubleshoot, or get unstuck—in completing projects provides a productive space in which to explore multiple theoretical perspectives that can contribute to our understanding of learning and teaching critical strategies for dealing with challenges in learning activities and environments. 

In response to increasing calls to include computational thinking (CT) in K-12 education, some researchers have argued for integrating science learning and CT. In that vein, this paper investigates conceptual learning and computational practices through the use of a code-first modeling environment called Frog Pond in a middle school classroom. The environment was designed to enable learners to explore models of evolutionary shifts through domain-specific agent-based visual programming. It was implemented as a curricular unit in seventh grade science class. We analyzed video and log data of two contrasting student pairs. This paper presents one of our findings: Development of modular core functional code-units or what we call anchor code. Anchor code is a body of code that creates a stable base from which further explorations take place. We argue that anchor code is evidence for conceptual learning and computational practices. 

A highly porous 2D nanomaterial, holey graphene oxide (hGO), is synthesized directly from holey graphene powder and employed to create an aqueous 3D printable ink without the use of additives or binders. Stable dispersions of hydrophilic hGO sheets in water (≈100 mg mL⁻¹) can be readily achieved. The shear‐thinning behavior of the aqueous hGO ink enables extrusion‐based printing of fine filaments into complex 3D architectures, such as stacked mesh structures, on arbitrary substrates. The freestanding 3D printed hGO meshes exhibit trimodal porosity: nanoscale (4–25 nm through‐holes on hGO sheets), microscale (tens of micrometer‐sized pores introduced by lyophilization), and macroscale (<500 µm square pores of the mesh design), which are advantageous for high‐performance energy storage devices that rely on interfacial reactions to promote full active‐site utilization. To elucidate the benefit of (nano)porosity and structurally conscious designs, the additive‐free architectures are demonstrated as the first 3D printed lithium–oxygen (Li–O₂) cathodes and characterized alongside 3D printed GO‐based materials without nanoporosity as well as nanoporous 2D vacuum filtrated films. The results indicate the synergistic effect between 2D nanomaterials, hierarchical porosity, and overall structural design, as well as the promise of a freeform generation of high‐energy‐density battery systems.