In this paper, we explore the ways in which a collegiate esports team’s play and performance underscore micro-level shifts in learning, domain mastery, and expertise through simultaneously collaborative and competitive gameplay. Specifically, with this aim, we evaluate how esports’ high-stakes team play and organizational activities provide evidence of processes and practices that are important for learning-relevant trajectories in and beyond higher education. Throughout the course of a threegame match in a major collegiate esports tournament, players demonstrated decision-making, reflection and dimensions of individual and collaborative learning. We also found support for improved meta-gaming knowledge – or distributed, communitycentered knowledge around the game – which underscored players’ domain learning and growth. Our findings highlightevidence of perceptual learning, as demonstrated through the players’ flexibility in adapting to increasingly complex challenges. We propose that these findings emphasize the importance of esports as meaningful and noteworthy learning ecologies which need to be more deeply examined in light of historic gender and racial barriers to educational and professional aspirations in gaming.

Past efforts have demonstrated efficacy in broadening maker learning and participation by leveraging the material affordances and implicit presumptions associated with content creation tools. Past work has found that the purposeful integration of activities that blend multiple toolkits to create integrated designs [17;19;20] can both broaden the understanding of these affordances and demonstrate equitable and inclusive outcomes for adolescent youth. We illustrate early stage findings from an interaction analysis of the micro-and meso-level learning and collaborative processes that children and early adolescent learners engaged in throughout purposefully arranged multiinterface design projects to understand their agency and engagement over time and across activities.

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Purpose The researchers conducted a collective case study to investigate how families engaged in making activities related to aerospace engineering in six pop-up makerspace programs held in libraries and one museum. The purpose of this paper is to support families’ engagement in design tasks and engineering thinking, three types of discussion prompts were used during each workshop. The orienting design conjecture was that discussion prompts would allow parents to lead productive conversations to support engineering-making activities. Design/methodology/approach Within a collective case study approach, 20 consented families (22 adults, 25 children) engaged in making practices related to making a lunar rover with a scientific instrument panel. Data included cases of families’ talk and actions, as documented through video (22 h) and photographs of their engineering designs. An interpretivist, qualitative video-based analysis was conducted by creating individual narrative accounts of each family (including transcript excerpts and images). Findings Parents used the question prompts in ways that were integral to supporting youths’ participation in the engineering activities. Children often did not answer the astronomer’s questions directly; instead, the parents revoiced the prompts before the children’s engagement. Family prompts supported reflecting upon prior experiences, defining the design problem and maintaining the activity flow. Originality/value Designing discussion prompts, within a broader project-based learning pedagogy, supports family engagement in engineering design practices in out-of-school pop-up makerspace settings. The work suggests that parents play a crucial role in engineering workshops for youths aged 5 to 10 years old by revoicing prompts to keep families’ design work and sensemaking talk (connecting prior and new ideas) flowing throughout a makerspace workshop.