With colleague Susan Land and our research team, I presented new findings in a paper at the Interaction Design and Children conference in Boston, MA, USA in June 2015. Through work supporting tablet-mediated science learning during summer camp, we discussed how children’s science talk was supported by our Tree Investigator mobile app. We found that children’s conceptual talk (claims) had less evidence provided when the children worked in peer-peer groups. When supported by an adult naturalist, children gave more descriptive evidence from their observation of trees to support their conceptual claims. We interpret this to mean that in tablet-mediated science learning in informal settings, an expert guide can be an important resource when children are learning complex ecological content.
Zimmerman, H. T., Land, S. M., Mohney, M. R., Maggiore, C., Kim, S. H., Choi, G. W., Jung, Y. J. & Dudek, J. (2015). Using augmented reality to support observations about trees during summer camp. Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children. Pp. 395-398. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2771839.2771925
