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BACKGROUND: Natureculture (Haraway, 2003; Fuentes, 2010) constructs offer a powerful framework for science education to explore learners’ interactions with and understanding of the natural world. Technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) designed to reveal pets’ sensory worlds and companionship with pets can facilitate learners’ harmonious relationships with significant others in naturecultures. METHODS: At a two-week virtual summer camp, we engaged teens in inquiring into dogs’ and cats’ senses using selective color filters, investigations, experience design projects, and understanding how the umwelt (von Uexküll, 2001) of pets impacts their lives with humans. We qualitatively analyzed participants’ talk, extensive notes, and projects completed at the workshop. FINDINGS: We found that teens engaged in the science and engineering practices of planning and carrying out investigations, constructing explanations and designing solutions, and questioning while investigating specific aspects of their pets’ lives. Further, we found that teens checking and taking pets’ perspectives while caring for them shaped their productive engagement in these practices. The relationship between pets and humans facilitated an ecological and relational approach to science learning. CONTRIBUTION: Our findings suggest that relational practices of caring and perspective-taking coexist with scientific practices and enrich scientific inquiry. 

Dance provides unique opportunities for embodied interdisciplinary learning experiences that can be personally and culturally relevant. danceON is a system that supports learners to leverage their body movement as they engage in artistic practices across data science, computing, and dance. The technology includes a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with declarative syntax and reactive behavior, a media player with pose detection and classification, and a web-based IDE. danceON provides a low-floor allowing users to bind virtual shapes to body positions in under three lines of code, while also enabling complex, dynamic animations that users can design working with conditionals and past position data. We developed danceON to support distance learning and deployed it in two consecutive cohorts of a remote, two-week summer camp for young women of color. We present our findings from an analysis of the experience and the resulting computational performances. The work identifies implications for how design can support learners’ expression across culturally relevant themes and examines challenges from the lens of usability of the computing language and technology. 

Feminist science approaches recognize the value of integrating empathy, closeness, subjectivity, and caring into scientific sensemaking. These approaches reject the notion that scientists must be objective and dispassionate, and expand the possibilities of what is considered valuable scientific knowledge. One avenue for engaging people in empathetically driven scientific inquiry is through learning activities about how our pets experience the world. In this study, we developed an augmented reality device we called DoggyVision that lets people see the world similar to dogs’ vision. We designed a scavenger-hunt for families where they explored indoor and outdoor environments with DoggyVision, collected data firsthand, and drew conclusions about the differences between how humans and dogs see the world. In this paper, we illustrate how our DoggyVision workshop re-mediated scientific inquiry and supported the integration of feminist practices into scientific sensemaking.