Computer-aided simulation-based platforms have been shown to be effective tools for teaching STEM concepts. At the same time, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) platforms encourage different viewpoints and approaches from the learners which can enrich the learning experience in STEM classrooms. The deployment in recent years of networked personal devices such as Chromebooks in classrooms has motivated educators to design collaborative learning tools for these devices. However, prior work has shown that using one-on-one devices may discourage students from talking among each other, which hinders collaboration. To understand the affordances of personal devices for CSCL tools within Biology curricula, we designed a collaborative plant growth simulation application that provides mirrored plant growth simulation views for every group member to facilitate a common visualization. In this paper, we present our findings from an in-the-wild study that evaluated the affordance and usability of the plant growth simulation application and investigated the nature of collaboration and engagement aided through the simulation mirroring feature. Our study results showed that the plant simulation application had high usability and acceptance. Moreover, mirroring the plant growth simulation improved collaboration, generated excitement, and stimulated conversation. We also identified episodes where collaboration was hindered due to off-task activities, troubleshooting, group dynamics, and lack of understanding that led us to outline some potential guidelines to improve the collaborative learning experience for the students in Biology classroom.

Creating effective middle school STEM curricula requires a combination of individual and collaborative learning. Prior studies showed that finding a proper balance and providing uninterrupted knowledge transmission between different learning modes can be challenging in such mixed pedagogical approaches. In this paper, we present a multi-device interactive educational platform named SimSnap to teach biology curriculum to middle school children. SimSnap facilitates interactions among touchscreen Chromebooks to perform in-class individual and group activities. We present a usability analysis study with eight middle school children where they learn about the influence of temperature on tomato plant growth. Our study demonstrated that SimSnap facilitates group discussions to complete collaborative tasks. It also creates seamless knowledge propagation between prior to current tasks to learn about more complex concepts from previous simpler activities. Middle school children gave overall high usability ratings and positive feedback on SimSnap. This study also helped to outline some design recommendations for future improvements of SimSnap.

We examined how Idea Wall, a collaboration spatially manipulable interactive note tool, supports collaborative scientific reasoning among students. Through a design-based research approach, the study also aims to identify potential improvements to the tool that can better support collaborative interactions. The Idea Wall has the ability to facilitate spatial manipulation and interactive note-taking supported student engagement and collaboration. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on the use of interactive tools to enhance scientific reasoning skills in collaborative learning environments. By researching the affordances and challenges of the tool, this study provides valuable insights into the design considerations and potential improvements of such tools in building new norms of collaborative discussion for a knowledge community.

The 32 chapters of the 2019 Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research synthesize the existing research in computing education and propose new directions for future research. An author from each chapter will summarize their chapter with auto-advancing slides. Attendees will be introduced to the breadth of content in the new handbook and can identify chapters of interest. This fits uniquely as a special session, and will likely be informative, inspiring, and overwhelming.

In this paper, we present the motivation for, and design of, City Settlers, a participatory simulation. In City Settlers learners engage in collaborative embodied play, competition, and sensemaking within the domains of sustainability, environmental complex systems, and city building. Learners work in teams running separate but interconnected cities, and need to deal with the interrelatedness of economic, ecological, and social systems which are integral to understanding sustainable development. Competing over some shared resources, and developing ad-hoc alliances during play -- players have the ability to optimize for different goals (industrial progress, agricultural progress, or social longevity). Learners are also scaffolded to reflect on the ways different desired goals lead to different individual and collective outcomes.

This paper presents Connected Spaces (C-S) -- a tool designed to promote collaboration in makerspaces. It also describes a pilot study designed to test C-S's effectiveness in enabling people to seek help from peers. In our pilot, some (but not all) students were able to leverage C-S's affordances. We explore both supporting and mitigating factors, and highlight design features for environments as well as tools to support divergent, open-ended exploration and learning.

While there is growing recognition of the need to support young learners as they develop computational thinking (CT) skills, this paper advocates for an increased focus on computational identity (CI) and digital empowerment (DE) in particular, as we posit that these CT skills will help young learners become self-motivated, innovative creators. When nurturing identity and empowerment, it is a persistent challenge to provide youth with real-world experiences and suitable development tools. This paper advances two key approaches to address these issues: 1) A critical computational literacy approach to engage youth in developing personally meaningful applications that have impact in the real world; 2) the use of a tool, like MIT App Inventor, that lowers barriers to creating useful, impactful technology. Using two case-based studies, we show how these two approaches have supported youth in developing applications that respond to meaningful challenges in their communities and helped them to establish their computational identities and digital empowerment.

In this paper, we describe a tablet application designed around an interactive game-based science museum exhibit. It is aimed to help provide museum docents useful information about the visitors' actions, in a way that is actionable, and enables docents to provide assistance and prompts to visitors that are more meaningful, compared to what they are typically able to do without this interface augmentation.

Interactive technologies like multi-touch tables enable museum exhibit designers to support visitors' learning with a wide range of resources (from multimedia to dynamic feedback to the presence of other visitors). Designers must decide, though, how best to align the affordances of these resources with the learning activities they are trying to support [23]. This work examines a multi-touch table exhibit designed to support an activity, tinkering, which has been identified as a form of interaction that may offer special benefits to novices learning about engineering [e.g., 4]. When a learner is tinkering, he or she is engaged in a process of iterative adjustment to a constructed artifact, making use of "just in time" resources and feedback to guide the next steps in their exploration of the problem space. The exhibit studied in this work provided several resources for supporting tinkering, and this paper presents a detailed case showing how these different resources (some technical, some social, and some sociotechnical) were or were not used by learners. A key design goal we identified was the need to transform the tacit engineering practices of visitors into visible engineering performances, such that those performances could serve as "cultural tools" [35] for mediating the learning of other visitors.

This paper describes a doctoral research study that examines a 13-week high school physics curriculum that engaged students as a knowledge community that leveraged user-contributed content for a series of scripted inquiry tasks. The focus of the study was the smart classroom culminating activity, in which students were orchestrated in a real-time activity to collaboratively solve ill-structure physics problems using Hollywood physics as their domain. The smart classroom leveraged the physical space of the room to contextualize student interactions, to connect students with peers in ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, and to localize cooperative and collaborative tasks. Intelligent software agents aided in the complex orchestration of students and materials based on emergent class patterns, and provided the teacher with critical cues for intervention. Large-format interactive displays provided students a space for negotiation and a representation of their collaborative knowledge construction, and for the teacher to observe individual groups' knowledge at-a-glance. This paper attempts to analyze the designed curriculum in terms of its support for a cross-contexts knowledge community and the real-time orchestration of inquiry activities within a smart classroom setting.

This paper presents our research of a pedagogical model known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), focusing on our design of a technological infrastructure for the orchestration of the complex CSCL scripts that characterize KCI curricula. We first introduce the KCI model including some basic design principles, and describe its dependency on real time learning analytics. Next, we describe our technology, known as SAIL Smart Space (S3), which provides scaffolding and analytic support of sequenced interactions amongst people, materials, tools and environments. We outline the critical role of the teacher in our designs and describe how S3 supports their active role in orchestration. Finally we outline two implementations of KCI/S3 and the role of learning analytics, in supporting dynamic collective visualizations, real time orchestrational logic, and ambient displays.

This paper describes the prototype development of the PIPWatch toolbar, a software interface device embedded within a Web browser designed to enable consumers to easily assess and compare the compliance of on-line businesses with Canadian private-sector privacy legislation - the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. (PIPEDA). It represents a new form of privacy enhancing technology (PET) that employs social navigation techniques to help an on-line community of individuals concerned about the handling of their personal information to build and share a database that tracks the privacy performance and regulatory compliance of Websites they visit.