Integrated STEM in Elementary Grades Using Distributed Agent-based Computation

TL;DR

This paper presents ViMAP-Tangible, a distributed agent-based learning environment that integrates physical and computational activities to enhance elementary students' STEM understanding through collaborative design tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel socio-technical environment combining ultrasonic sensors with visual programming for elementary STEM education, demonstrating its effectiveness in fostering computational and scientific skills.

Findings

Students engaged in collaborative design of drawing machines.

The environment supported learning of multiplication, rates, and Newtonian mechanics.

Key affordances linked physical constructions with computational models.

Abstract

We investigate how the integration of visual agent-based programming and computationally augmented physical structures can support curricular integration across STEM domains for elementary grade students. We introduce ViMAP-Tangible, a socio-technically distributed computational learning environment, which integrates ultrasonic sensors with the ViMAP visual programming language using a distributed computation infrastructure. In this paper, we report a study in which 3rd and 4th grade students used ViMAP-Tangible to engage in collaborative design-based activities in order to invent 'drawing machines' for generating geometric shapes. The curricular activities integrate engineering practices such as user-centered design, mathematical reasoning about multiplication, rates and fractions, and physical science concepts central to learning Newtonian mechanics. We identify the key affordances of the learning environment and our pedagogical approach in terms of the relationship between the structural elements of students' physical constructions and computational models, and their learning outcomes, both in terms of computational thinking, and the domain-specific, mathematical and scientific knowledge that they began developing.