Back to the future

Abstract

This paper describes the design and pilot enactment of an instructional unit for elementary school students, Hunger Games, which centers on development of learner understandings of animal foraging behavior. Inspired by traditional teaching practices employing physical simulations, within the unit students engage in an embodied enactment of foraging using stuffed animals (with embedded RFID tags) as tangible avatars to represent their foraging among food patches (with camouflaged RFID readers) distributed around a classroom. Displays situated near the food patches provide students with information regarding the energy gain as the forage in the environment. A two-period pilot enactment of the unit demonstrated the feasibility of the design for classroom use, evidenced the development of affective relationships between learners and avatars, and afforded the emergence of unanticipated behaviors that promoted new questions about the science phenomena. The results suggest provisional support for the effectiveness of the unit as a science learning environment.

Knowledge Places

“…Over the past decade, researchers have explored the use of ambulatory, whole-room activity structures in support of community knowledge construction around shared objects of inquiry. While some of these applications require instrumentation to support continuous tracking of persons or artifacts, e.g., STEP, from Danish et al [5], other designs such as Hunting of the Snark [13], BeeSim [12] and Hunger Games [7] require only the detection of arrivals and departures at designated "hot spots" within the room. These latter approaches suggest the potential for the use of lower-cost, "surface mount" proximity-based technologies such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), inductive and capacitive Near-Field Communication (NFC), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) iBeacon [9] that could be more widely adopted than technologies requiring extensive embedded instrumentation.…”