Second Life Unplugged: A Design for Fostering At-risk Students' STEM Agency

Authors

  • Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell TERC Education Research Collaborative
  • Dor Abrahamson University of California, Berkeley

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v2i5.834

Keywords:

youth, virtual worlds, pedagogy, STEM

Abstract

At an alternative high school serving predominantly at-risk underrepresented students evicted from mainstream education, we designed and implemented Fractal Village, a critical-constructionist computational and mathematical pedagogy learning environment. Fractal Village, instantiated in the virtual world "Second Life," constituted an empirical environment to research our emergent model of mathematical/computational agency (m/c) as well as an intervention
aiming to foster such agency. Key research objectives were to: (1) study relations amongst cognitive, affective, material, technological, and social factors that would contribute to individual development of m/c agency; and (2) delineate design principles for fostering m/c agency. The student cohort engaged collaboratively in virtual world imaginative construction activities each manifesting generative themes (Freire, 1968), to which the designers-as-teachers tailored mathematical and computer-science concepts, such that students appropriated the STEM content apropos of tackling their own emergent construction problems. We argue that to build agency, students must develop both skills and dispositions

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Section

SLACTIONS 2009 Selected Papers