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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. 

Making engages young people with the material world and reflection-in-action, creating promising science learning contexts. Emphasizing relational and social dimensions of making, we conducted a week-long workshop for middle schoolers who are current and aspiring pet companions. Supporting participants’ inquiry into pets’ senses and related behaviors, we asked them to work on maker projects meant to improve their pets’ lives. Following a qualitative analysis of participants’ positioning in relation to their pets, we present case studies of two female participants’ positioning. We find that through the process of making, the two participants demonstrated an increased awareness of pets’ biology and related behavior and their personal interests in pet care, while also differing in what aspects of human-pet relations they focused on. We conclude that through making, especially in contexts with a robust relational draw, youth become attentive to complex and otherwise difficult-to-notice transactions central to taking care of pets. 

Based on the widely recognized situated nature of identity and youth as social producers and products, this qualitative case study reports findings from a week-long informal pet-sciences workshop for middle schoolers who have existing relationships with pets or a strong interest in future pet companionship. Mindful of the structure-agency dialectic, we analyze youth’s wayfaring and trajectories of identification as they learn about their pets at the workshop, accounting for how youth see themselves and their pets and are seen by others. In contrast to a commonly assumed analytic directionality seeing people as moving towards or away from STEM, we find that there were different ways for youth to meaningfully engage themselves in learning about their pets at the workshop. We conclude that attention to fluidity in youth’s identifications can inform us, the adults in the community, of the need to affirm the many possible trajectories that youth may follow. 

Participatory Design (PD) aims to minimize the unintended consequences of designs and innovations by inviting users to engage in the process (Muller & Druin, 2012). Designing with some users—for example, pets—is challenging because pets communicate in unique ways. But it holds promise because pets and humans are companions. Expecting teens' relationships with pets to motivate them to be co-designers, we organized a virtual summer workshop engaging teens in activities to understand their canine and feline pets better and design an experience to improve their pets’ lives. We analyzed video recordings of teens' engagement at the camp and their descriptions of their experience design projects using qualitative thematic analysis. We found that caring and loving relationships with pets are also contexts for engaging in a systematic design process. 

Pets are beloved family members in many cultures. Companionship with pets motivates and positions humans as inquirers as they find out their pets' experiences with them. With the need to advance science education from dualist notions of the world and the learner as separate entities, our research team conducted a two-week online summer camp to engage teens and their pets in investigations around pets' senses. Following a qualitative analysis of participants' talk and projects at the workshop, we found that teens engaged in science learning practices while investigating aspects of their pets' lives and designing experiences for them. Additionally, participants adopted an ecological and relational approach to science learning that positioned themselves and their pets as subjects. We discuss implications for future work with pets, and for the design of other STEM learning environments that engage perspective-taking, empathy, and care. 

We facilitated a remote educational summer camp for teenage youth, with participants “sheltering in place” at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The summer camp was part of an initiative aimed at promoting STEM education for youth through learning about their pets’ senses and engaging in a co-design project to enrich aspects of their pets’ lives. We describe how situating scientific and design activities within the home and with pets engages participants in ethnomethodological practices such as field work, naturalistic observation, and in situ design that build upon their funds of knowledge. We discuss implications for the designs of learning environments that leverage the benefits of at-home science and design with pets. 

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. 

In the past decade, both cognitive science and the learning sciences have been significantly altered by an increased attention to the theme of embodiment. Broadly speaking, this theme complements (or pushes back against) the notion of purely abstract, “disembodied” cognition and emphasizes the role of physical interaction with the environment in the course of learning and development. A common, if usually implicit, assumption in this work is that learners’ bodies are more or less constant from one era to another: after all, human senses, limbs, physiology, and the basic parameters of cognition are part of an ongoing evolutionary human endowment. This assumption, while historically reasonable, is likely to need reconsideration in the near future, as a variety of “transhumanist” technologies (enhanced senses, bodies, and internalized interfaces with the outside physical environment) become more prevalent in children’s lives. This paper discusses several foundational issues and questions that are poised to emerge, and to challenge our enduring ideas about children and education, in the foreseeable future.