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This paper examines youth storytelling during co-design of an identity-expressive educational game for learning data science. Using interaction analysis of co-design interviews with middle school students, we explore how storytelling allows participants to (a) use existing game elements to position themselves and (b) express their interests and identities through imagined game futures. We argue that analyzing youth's interactive storytelling and identity enactments during co-design can inform the development of game narratives that represent diverse youth. Our findings contribute to the design of inclusive virtual worlds for STEM learning that celebrate youth identities and experiences. We discuss implications for engaging youth voices in the co-design process and creating educational games that resonate with diverse learners. 

Our poster explores visualization methods for participation in an identity-aligned, multiplayer video game world for learning data science through relationship and community building. We extend methods of representing engagement and learning in both educational games and in data science education contexts. Using simulated game play data and screen capture records of interviews with middle school girls playing an early version of the game, we explore representations for individual and multiplayer learning. 

This paper reports on systematic literature review that examined learning theories and data collection and analysis methods used to study game-based learning in research on educational digital games for K-12 populations. Through electronic database, hand, and ancestral searches, we identified 25 empirical studies (29 educational games) published in peer-review journals that report evidence of how students learn through in-game and out-of-game data collection and analysis methods. Taking an approach to game-based learning as identity-driven and situated, we found that while games do not take such an approach to game-based learning, games tend to collect data on players’ social interactions and collaborative experiences. The review also highlighted the opportunity for providing real-time feedback and data to players during gameplay. 

This paper investigates storytelling as an approach to co-design research with diverse middle school-aged youth. Using microanalytic methods of interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and positioning theory (Goffman, 1981) to analyze data from online play-testing and co-design sessions with youth, the paper explores how storytelling enabled youth to navigate and shift between the dual roles of game player and designer, (re)configuring elements of the existing game and incorporating their own stories. This paper advocates for the inclusion of storytelling as a fruitful co-design method in the creation of identity-aligned gaming experiences and more immersive and inclusive virtual worlds. 

Overly simplistic school science laboratories constrain student agency. We share and discuss a case from 9th grade science classroom in which students all conducted highly varied independent investigations that were each highly coherent and scientifically well-motivated. We discuss the conditions that led to their experiments in terms of instability and uncertainty. Our findings suggest that it may be beneficial to support and recognize multiple forms of uncertainty simultaneously to encourage multiple forms of investigation to respond to those uncertainties. Finally, an “instability” caused by having multiple candidate models or explanations in play may be more generative than uncertainties based on gaps in knowledge. 

Computational tools are being integrated into science classrooms, but in ways that are often procedurally prescribed, constraining learner agency and ignoring student purposes and epistemic practices. We draw on theory and approaches from making-oriented education to introduce computational tinkering in science as a construct for thinking about and designing for learning with computational tools. Across two design research cycles in high school science classrooms, we analyze episodes of student activity to understand how practices of computational tinkering might translate from informal settings to formal science classrooms to enable learners to engage in practices that reflect authentic scientific work, draw upon learner experiences, and support more equitable participation in science. Looking across both student-centered and curricula-centered science classrooms for emergent goals, rapid iteration, and noticing and reflection, we saw computational tinkering take shape during moments of play, troubleshooting and tuning, and sharing. We discuss findings and implications for practice in relation to professional science practice and goals of science education in an era of computational ascendancy. 

With our partners at Manylabs, we are developing Dataflow, a browser-based application that (unlike other IoT platforms) not only lets students collect and view sensor data, but also allows them to write programs that transform that data to control physical actuators. Dataflow uses Raspberry Pis as WiFi-enabled devices that can execute these control programs because they are inexpensive but powerful computers. The Pis run a client program that reads data from all USB-connected sensors, runs student programs, and sets the states of USB-connected actuators.