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The Idea Wall is a collaborative technology that aims to support collective knowledge construction and idea negotiation across multiple social configurations. Further, to support multiple entry points for student collaboration, the Idea Wall provides (and requires) multiple modalities for interaction through text, collaborative discourse, and spatial orientation of ideas. To support the teacher in implementing and orchestrating Idea Wall activities, we designed: 1) an authoring portal to enable teachers to quickly create Idea Wall instances; 2) a whole class view to support whole class discussions; and 3) a set of real-time agents that can alert the teacher when students may need teacher intervention or new groupings based on natural language processing of students’ co-constructed ideas within the Idea Wall. 

Focusing on developing maker-identities, especially for historically marginalized students in the computational field, can empower them to recognize and take ownership of their space in the field. Drawing from identity related literature in maker and computing related fields we identified seven factors of maker-identity - interest and motivation, competence and performance, confidence and self-efficacy, recognition, utility value and meaningfulness, perceptions of community, and external factors. Using this, we analyzed semi-structured interviews of students who participated in our summer makerspace camp to understand how these identity factors manifested in their reflections of the camp. We tie back our findings of positive impacts on maker-identity structures to the design structures of our makerspace such as co-design of the space, use-modify-create strategies, and open-ended design projects. 

There has been a large push in education over the last decade to drive STEM learning interest during the formative years of adolescence through the usage of engaging computer science related initiatives such as computational makerspaces that allow students to design and build a wide array of personally connected artifacts. But for these initiatives to work, students must be interested in the journey, and the curricula that drive many of these programs are not often designed to be culturally relevant to many of the students they are aimed at motivating. This paper investigated how computational making curricula can be designed in a reflexive and culturally supportive manner by following the trajectory and tensions faced by a black middle school student as he makes his way through the first iteration of such a space. 

In this paper we share the seemingly ordinary community-building digital technologies that helped facilitate nine days of virtual professional development (PD) on the Electronic Textiles (hereafter e-textiles) unit for Exploring Computer Science (ECS). The e-textiles unit challenges teachers to learn new content about computing by designing functional circuitry in hands-on, personalized crafts, in ways that stimulate inclusive pedagogy and asset-based perspectives of students. Finding the right combination of supportive technologies spanned two years, including planning and two rounds of implementation (2020-2022), with careful reflection for re-design. We decided on a few seemingly basic digital technologies that supported the following design goals: 1) transparency of in-progress crafts, 2) community-building, and 3) connection to teachers’ everyday classroom practice. Below we share three technology choices that orient our revised PD model with explanations for those choices rooted in theory and practice. 

Maker activities help students connect to STEAM content through hands-on activities that emphasize the roles of mentors, peers, and in-person interaction with physical artifacts. Despite the positive affordances of these activities, they do not translate well to online settings. Without immediate in-person feedback mechanisms, unstructured making activities may lead to frustration and decreased engagement. How do communities help students develop identities as future engineers if local help and mentorship is not available? The proposed study aims to address challenges of scaffolding collaboration during remote maker sessions through investigation of a novel projection device that allows users to talk & share gestures around a common physical artifact while in separate locations. 

SimSnap responds to the need for a technology-based tool that supports learning at three social planes—individual, small group, and whole-class—while being easy to deploy with minimal technology overhead costs during their uptake. While much research has examined the efficacy of large-scale collaborative systems and individual-oriented learning systems, the intersection of and the movement between the three social planes is under explored. SimSnap is a cross-device, tablet-based platform that facilitates learning science concepts for middle school students through interactive simulations. Students in physical proximity can ‘snap’ their devices together to collaborate on learning activities. SimSnap enables real-time transition between individual and group activities in a classroom by offering reconfigurable simulations. SimSnap also provides an environment where open-ended and task-specific learning trajectories can be explored to maximize students’ learning potential. In this iteration of SimSnap, we have designed and implemented our first curriculum on SimSnap, focusing on plant biology, ecosystems, and genetics. 

SimSnap responds to the need for a technology-based tool that supports learning at three social planes—individual, small group, and whole-class—while being easy to deploy with minimal technology overhead costs during their uptake. While much research has examined the efficacy of large-scale collaborative systems and individual-oriented learning systems, the intersection of and the movement between the three social planes is under explored. SimSnap is a cross-device, tablet-based platform that facilitates learning science concepts for middle school students through interactive simulations. Students in physical proximity can ‘snap’ their devices together to collaborate on learning activities. SimSnap enables real-time transition between individual and group activities in a classroom by offering reconfigurable simulations. SimSnap also provides an environment where open-ended and task-specific learning trajectories can be explored to maximize students’ learning potential. In this iteration of SimSnap, we have designed and implemented our first curriculum on SimSnap, focusing on plant biology, ecosystems, and genetics.