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Abstract While there is increased interest in using movement and embodiment to support learning due to the rise in theories of embodied cognition and learning, additional work needs to be done to explore how we can make sense of students collectively developing their understanding within a mixed-reality environment. In this paper, we explore embodied communication’s individual and collective functions as a way of seeing students’ learning through embodiment. We analyze data from a mixed-reality (MR) environment: Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) (Danish et al., International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 15:49–87, 2020), using descriptive statistics and interaction analysis to explore the role of gesture and movement in student classroom activities and their pre-and post-interviews. The results reveal that students appear to develop gestures for representing challenging concepts within the classroom and then use these gestures to help clarify their understanding within the interview context. We further explore how students collectively develop these gestures in the classroom, with a focus on their communicative acts, then provide a list of individual and collective functions that are supported by student gestures and embodiment within the STEP MR environment, and discuss the functions of each act. Finally, we illustrate the value of attending to these gestures for educators and designers interested in supporting embodied learning. 

Existing approaches to instructional design each have a core focal unit of analysis; some focus on developing a specific tool, some focus on a sequence of tasks, and more recently, some approaches have focused more broadly on activities. However, we find that these don’t go far enough as real-world implementations require that learners move through a shifting sequence of activities with teachers attending to these shifts. We therefore propose and illustrate an approach to design grounded in focusing on how the design of activities, including tools, necessarily need to shift over time to support learning.