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This work is part of an ongoing partnership that seeks to create a sustainable infrastructure to support GIS-infused instruction in a large urban school district. In this paper, we report an illustrative cross-case comparison of two teachers’ approaches to infusing GIS in their courses. The goal of this analysis is to examine how GIS-infused instruction is adapted in different contexts and to consider the affordances of divergent approaches. Findings illustrate the relationships among organizational context, individual and collective context, particularly teacher identity, and instructional practice in the work of spreading GIS-infused instruction. We also discuss key lessons learned in our partnership thus far and implications for district-level partnerships focused on spread and scale. 

As excitement for Minecraft continues to grow, we consider its potential to function as an engaging environment for practicing and studying spatial reasoning. To support this exposition, we describe a glimpse of our current analysis of spatial reasoning skills in Minecraft. Twenty university students participated in a laboratory study that asked them to recreate three existing buildings in Minecraft. Screen captures of user actions, together with eye tracking data, helped us identify ways that students utilize perspective taking, constructing mental representations, building and place-marking, and error checking. These findings provide an initial impetus for further studies of the types of spatial skills that students may exhibit while playing Minecraft. It also introduces questions about how the design of Minecraft activities may promote, or inhibit, the use of certain spatial skills. 

Geographic information systems (GIS) is valuable as a teaching and learning tool and will play a key role in the careers of current K-12 students (NRC, 2006). However, little work has been done to understand effective approaches to integrating GIS into content instruction. In this paper, we discuss the adaptation of the Learning for Use model, a framework for the design of technology-supported, content-driven inquiry tasks (Edelson, 2001), for the context of GIS-infused content courses. Using a design-based research approach, we developed a set of design principles that reflect key elements of effective GIS-driven content instruction, which guided the adaptation of the design framework. The goal of this work is to develop a set of supports to scaffold the co-design and implementation of GIS-infused content courses that will inform a general design model of infusing GIS into content courses. 

This study examines technology-enhanced STEAM learning among fifth and sixth grade students in one set of in-school makerspaces. It focuses on the learning of one set of meta-disciplinary skills, spatial skills. Prior research has shown these skills to be relevant for STEAM achievement, but they have been underemphasized in our schools and in the literature on learning through making. Informed by a distributed cognition perspective and using a combination of qualitative categorical coding and interaction analysis, this study provides a learning sciences approach to studying spatial thinking and learning. Analyses show that during making activities students engaged in frequent and diverse spatial thinking with a variety of social and material resources and that the sociomaterial contexts of different making activities facilitated different types of spatial thinking. They also show that spatial thinking developed over time and led to problem-solving insights.