Growing SAM: Bringing Animation into Informal STEM Educational Settings

通常，当老师想要探究学生对一个概念的理解时，她会让学生把它写下来。理科学生写实验报告，阅读学生写读书报告；即使在数学上，学生们也经常要写下他们是如何解决这道数学题的。不幸的是，许多学生不喜欢写作，因此不一定能给老师她想要的洞察力。在美国国家科学基金会资助的塔夫茨大学的研究中，研究人员正在开发一种软件工具集，使学生能够构建停止动作电影（SAM），作为表达数学和科学思想的一种手段。SAM并不是要取代标准的报告方法，而是要增强它们。塔夫茨大学的研究人员观察了学生们如何因为报告机制的不同而学习不同，他们发现动画甚至可以激励和推动学习（因为学生们想要改进他们的电影）。这项正在进行的工作已经达到了一半，并开始在课堂上显示出初步的成功。改变报告方法导致学生们对上课感到兴奋。他们愿意在课后留下来完成他们的“报告”，并会积极地与老师讨论他们正在学习的科学。这项探索性的资助将允许PI加入Tufts团队，这样项目就可以在开发阶段扩展到其他学习环境中。项目将把研究扩展到非学校学习环境，特别侧重于接触非洲裔美国人和拉丁裔社区。这项工作的时机对两个机构都至关重要，其结果将是互利的。这个探索性项目的成果将使Tufts能够在他们的SAM软件仍处于开发阶段时改进用户界面，从而有可能开辟一个新的学习市场。另一方面，加州大学圣地亚哥分校将获得新的工具，利用他们已经拥有的大量基础设施和专业知识，向弱势群体教授逻辑思维和基本编程。更广泛的影响：本研究将SAM方法扩展到弱势学生的非传统教育环境（例如，课后学习环境），并将进一步帮助我们了解儿童在不同环境中如何学习。

Typically when a teacher wants to probe a student's understanding of a concept, she asks him to write about it. In science students write lab reports, in reading they write book reports; even in math, students often have to write how they solved the math problem. Unfortunately, many students do not enjoy writing and therefore do not necessarily give the teacher the insight she is looking for. In currently funded NSF work at Tufts University, researchers are developing a software toolset that allows students to build stop action movies (SAM) as a means for representing ideas about math and science. SAM is not meant to replace the standard reporting methods, but rather to augment them. Tufts investigators, looking at how students learn differently as a result of the difference in reporting mechanism, are finding that animation can even motivate and drive the learning (because students want to improve their movies). This ongoing work has reached the halfway point, and is starting to show preliminary successes in the classroom. Changing the reporting methodology has resulted in students being excited about coming to class. They willingly stay after class to complete their "reports", and will actively discuss the science they are learning with each other and with the teacher. This exploratory grant will allow the PI to join the Tufts team, as it were, so that the project can branch out into other learning environments while still in the development stage. The PI will extend the research to non-school-based learning environments, with particular concentration on reaching out to African-American and Latino communities. The timing of this work is critical for both institutions, and the results will be mutually beneficial. Outcomes of this exploratory project will enable Tufts to improve the user interface while their SAM software is still in development, and thereby potentially open up a new learning market. UCSD, on the other hand, will acquire new tools to teach logical thinking and elementary programming to disadvantaged populations, exploiting the substantial infrastructure and expertise they already have in place. Broader Impacts: This research will extend the SAM approach into non-traditional educational settings (e.g., the after-school learning environment) for disadvantaged students, and will further help our understanding in general of how kids learn in different environments.