From Agents to Continuous Change via Aesthetics: Learning Mechanics with Visual Agentbased Computational Modeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces ViMAP, a visual programming language, and a curricular sequence to help students understand continuous change and motion through agent-based modeling, supported by observational studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel visual programming environment, ViMAP, and a structured learning sequence for teaching kinematics to diverse students, integrating programming with science learning.

Findings

Students improved understanding of continuous motion concepts.

The ViMAP environment facilitated seamless integration of programming and physics.

Observational data showed positive engagement and learning outcomes.

Abstract

Novice learners find motion as a continuous process of change challenging to understand. In this paper, we present a pedagogical approach based on agent-based, visual programming to address this issue. Integrating Logo programming with curricular science has been shown to be challenging in previous research on educational computing. We present a new Logo-based visual programming language - ViMAP - and, a sequence of learning activities involving programming and modeling, designed specifically to support seamless integration between programming and learning kinematics. We describe relevant affordances of the ViMAP environment that supports such seamless integration. We then present ViMAP-MoMo, a curricular unit designed in ViMAP for modeling kinematics, for a wide range of students (elementary - high school). The main contribution of this paper is that we describe in detail a sequence of learning activities in three phases, discuss the underlying rationale for each phase, and where relevant, report results in the form of observational data from two studies.