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Our work aims to increase the collaborative ability of college students in computer science classrooms where students must work towards a shared goal with peers from different backgrounds and abilities. Our work focuses specifically on leveraging high-quality collaborative design to bridge the gap between fiber arts and robotics by enlightening students to their shared foundations in mathematics and computational thinking. We achieve this goal through the design of SPEERLoom (Semi-automated Pattern Executing Educational Robotic Loom), a new open-source Jacquard loom kit designed to foster students' exploration of weaving, mechatronics, mathematics, and computational thinking. In this demonstration we present SPEERLoom and allow the exploration of a sample lesson using the loom. 

At its core, collaboration is about bringing diverse perspectives together to create something new. Diversity may arise along a multiplicity of dimensions, leading to some very similar challenges, and other dimension-specific challenges, each of which require discrete skills to address. Interdisciplinary collaboration, while understudied, has particular workplace relevance. This research seeks to understand what is specific to interdisciplinary collaboration as part of a broader agenda to operationalize key underlying skills that enable interdisciplinary collaboration and subsequently assess and support interdisciplinary collaboration, both in the classroom and in the workplace. The aim of this poster presentation is to engage the community in an intellectual exchange about underlying questions to inform work in progress. 

Understanding abstract concepts in mathematics has continuously presented as a challenge, but the use of directed and spontaneous gestures has shown to support learning and ground higher-order thought. Within embodied learning, gesture has been investigated as part of a multimodal assemblage with speech and movement, centering the body in interaction with the environment. We present a case study of one dyad’s undertaking of a robotic arm activity, targeting learning outcomes in matrix algebra, robotics, and spatial thinking. Through a body syntonicity lens and drawing on video and pre- and post- assessment data, we evaluate learning gains and investigate the multimodal processes contributing to them. We found gesture, speech, and body movement grounded understanding of vector and matrix operations, spatial reasoning, and robotics, as anchored by the physical robotic arm, with implications for the design of learning environments that employ directed gestures. 

Haptic force feedback systems are unique in their ability to dynamically render physical representations. Although haptic devices have shown promise for supporting learning, prior work mainly describes results of haptic-supported learning without identifying underlying learning mechanisms. To this end, we designed a haptic-supported learning environment and analyzed four students who used it to make connections between two different mathematical representations of sine and cosine: the unit circle, and their graph on the Cartesian plane. We highlight moments where students made connections between the representations, and identify how the haptic feedback supported these moments of insight. We use this evidence in support of a proposed theoretical and design framework for educational haptics. This framework captures four types of haptic representations, and focuses on one -- the haptic bridge -- that effectively scaffolds sense-making with multiple representations.