No abstract

Elementary school science focuses on the early phases of science inquiry: observation, description, data collection, reflection, and reporting. Technologies afford opportunities to scaffold and extend the domains of inquiry, but successful adoption depends on their integration with classroom organization and practice. In elementary schools, small group and whole class activities dominate over solitary activity, and the effective use of traditional desktop computer systems has proven to be a difficult challenge for classroom teachers. Increasingly affordable large-format displays more naturally support small-group collaboration, but require careful activity design to maximize utility. We describe an activity design employing large displays that accommodates both the constraints of the classroom and the play experiences of children in support of observational science learning.

Third-and sixth-grade students used a graphical simulation of the honeybee dance presented on a plasma panel deployed for several weeks in the corner of their classrooms. Among third graders, acceptance was hindered by discrepancies between the representation of phenomena in the simulation and students' prior knowledge of those phenomena. Sixth graders were forgiving of fidelity limitations, but experienced delays in learning due to their imposition of a "video game" interpretation of the activity.