EXP: Hands-on Haptics Laboratories for Classroom and Online Learning

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The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that will help envision the next generation of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Cyberlearning Exploration (EXP) Projects explore the viability of new kinds of learning technologies by designing and building new kinds of learning technologies and studying their possibilities for fostering learning and challenges to using them effectively. This project's technology innovation is a haptic (force-feedback) toolkit to be used in learning science and engineering content that involves forces. The toolkit the team is developing will allow learners (K-12 and beyond) to manipulate simulations and models through touch-sensitive devices and to directly feel resulting forces. Learning and using the science of forces is quite complex, as the ways forces actually combine and have effects are not always consistent with what people experience. Understanding forces, however, is essential for pursuits as varied as engineering, rehabilitative medicine, and construction and for understanding concepts and phenomena in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering fields. The kind of direct engagement with forces at the micro-level that the proposed toolkit will allow has potential to foster better scientific understanding across this whole set of fields. Research in the context of this technological innovation focuses on the extent to which and the conditions under which such embodied experience with phenomena fosters deeper understanding. The role of embodied experiences in learning is both an important issue in learning how to better foster learning and a newly-emerging possibility for learning technologies. In this project, the PIs examine the potential for haptic technology to expand and transform student learning. The haptic interface being developed is a mechatronic device programmed with force-displacement relationships that a user experiences through the sense of touch. The project aims to demonstrate the ways the programming and use of haptic devices as a part of lab experiences can impact learning. The PI is a mechanical engineer who is expert in materials and devices. The co-PI is a learning scientist engaged closely with the maker movement and with helping learners learn from simulation and modeling experiences. Through an iterative, design-based research approach, new haptic devices and accompanying visual programming software are being created to enable interactive hands-on virtual laboratories for biology, chemistry, and physics, and experiments are being carried out to understand both how to use such devices well to foster learning and the affordances of haptics in learning force-related concepts and its added value in the context of learning through modeling and simulation.