Promoting Interactive Learning: A Classroom Exercise to Explore Foraging Strategies

Beaumont, Ellen S.; Rowe, Graham; Mikhaylov, Natalie S.

doi:10.11120/beej.2012.19000008

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The practitioner literature is rich with examples of these exercises. One lesson introduces the topics of prey switching and development of search images by using chickpeas augmented with different colored dots to represent food items of varying richness, asking students to transfer them from a source bin to a receptacle using chopsticks [2]. Another situates learners as birds searching for sticky notes of different colors attached to the undersides of classroom chairs and desks to explore the interaction of food distribution on the success of solitary vs. flock foraging [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Back to the future

Gnoli

Perritano

Guerra

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%