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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. 

Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students’ STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students’ ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research–practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post–Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students’ diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use. 

Syncretic literacy can link everyday and scientific concepts in student learning. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a curricular unit in a bilingual middle school science class developed to help students link everyday conceptions, conceptions from math, science, and computer science, and their own broad linguistic repertoires to support syncretic literacy in modeling and statistics in a unit on post-Hurricane Maria outmigration from Puerto Rico. The unit invited students to use printed maps, physical objects, computer code, and simulations to explore concepts such as percentages and scientific models, framed by an approach from translanguaging pedagogy. Qualitative study showed that this approach supported students to engage productively in the tensions between scientific and everyday conceptions as described in Gutiérrez (2014), while using language resources from across communities and disciplines. 

This symposium aims to build on the argument for viewing video recording as theory (Hall, 2000) by focusing on instances when participants intentionally engage with ongoing recording, move/interact with recording equipment, and (re)purpose video records. All four papers use example interactions to highlight how participants reorient data collection and use, reorganizing control over how their stories are recorded, shared, and analyzed in the future; we argue that these moves are attempts to further relationship building, countering the surveillance technologies cameras have become (Vossoughi & Escude, 2016). We discuss further the methodological implications for future research, asking video recording as whose theory?