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Studies have been devoted to the design, implementation, and evaluation of mobile learning in practice. A common issue among students' responses toward this type of learning concerns the pitfalls of mobile devices, including small screen, limited input options, and low computational power. As a result, mobile devices are not always perceived by students as beneficial tools for their learning. Such perception undermines the use of mobile devices in learning and dampens teachers' interest in adopting mobile learning. This study tackles this issue and proposes that contextualizing the use of mobile devices can promote students' attitudes toward the use of mobile devices in learning. In other words, the use of mobile devices in learning should be in conjunction with the ambient artifacts where the user is and corresponding experience may provide the user with a positive perception toward the use of mobile devices. The proposed approach is evaluated by a sample practice to obtain preliminary supporting evidence. Further discussion is made on some innovative designs of mobile learning practices. This study is to provide a different view of mobile devices' pitfalls in learning and suggests that, relying on appropriate design, these pitfalls can be overcome to embrace a broader spectrum of mobile learning practice designs.

This paper proposes the integrative learning of technology and science in which students create their own science applications on smartphones. The proposed learning aims to help students experience what science is and how it is technically utilized. In addition, discipline-specific representations were emphasized in the learning design to help students translate between those in different disciplinary and build up their meta-representational competence, central to engineering professional practice as well as learning about engineering design process in school. During the integrative learning, students were also expected to experience the shift of coding from studying how to write a program code to how to control a device to solve a problem, the computational thinking. The proposed learning practice was held and evaluated with 85 participants from high schools and universities. The results showed that students were motivated, and valued the proposed learning practice. Students perceived the usefulness and ease of use of the tools adopted in the learning practice. The study results suggest that the use of smartphones in education may support the orchestrating of the teaching and learning of science and engineering.

Engineers must be able to collaborate with experts across disciplinary boundaries to successfully address the complex challenges of a contemporary workplace. The related training and research on motivating and engaging engineering students in schools is limited and rarely accounts for students’ lived experiences in the curriculum design. Meanwhile, programming is a medium of communication that can be reflexive with other domains and has been treated as a way of thinking about and exploring disciplines beyond computer science. In this study, engineering students used authoring tools of mobile app to design an English-learning app, in which English teachers provide feedbacks for revision, and a preliminary cross-disciplinary collaboration is asserted. The learning design referred to the frameworks of constructing socio-technical creativity to aid the students in employing their existing English knowledge to design mobile apps. The evaluation was conducted on the basis of the students’ designed apps and presentation, teachers’ feedback, and students’ self-reports. The results indicated that the common use of mobile apps in people daily life seemed to create a boundary object for the engineering students and English teachers to express, communicate, and coordinate their perspectives and knowledge. Students could view the engineering work from different aspects and appreciate English teachers’ comments and value their expertise. By accounting for the interests of students and schools’ limited resources, this study serves as a reference for cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration methodology.

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