Category: Research Projects
In collaboration with James Madison University and Northwestern University, we are investigating how learners make sense of spatiotemporal data and how technology-based affordances can support learners in understanding and analyzing spatiotemporal data.
Google “Japanese Internment data” and you’ll find thousands of links. There are sites dedicated to Japanese culture, ancestry, and history, plus government records, university departments, museums, and public television stations with scores of information. There are even sites devoted to finding other sites with links to data. I recently found myself, like Edgar Allan Poe, […]
Orrin Murray is a principal researcher at American Institutes for Research and external evaluator for our TecRocks project. We all come into the world primed to wonder. Curiosity is the internal drive that leads us from exploring our own hands and feet as a newborn to breakthroughs in everything from farming to space exploration. And […]
The authors of the 1972 book entitled The Limits to Growth set out to answer a critically important question. Can Earth sustain a human population that pursues a goal of continual economic growth? Based on a computer model they created, their answer was both guarded and cautionary: “If the present growth trends in world population, […]
Linsey Brennan is a doctoral student at Michigan State University and a researcher on the Multilevel Computational Modeling Project. Chemistry teachers Scott Hanson and Tim Muhich have used SageModeler to help students model systems and explain real-world phenomena for the past four years. According to the pair of teachers at the Battle Creek Area Math […]
In collaboration with EL Education and researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, DataPBL aims to co-design two data-enhanced interdisciplinary modules with middle school teachers and research student agency and positive identities related to data.
Traditional geologic maps beautifully illustrate the many different types of rock found on Earth’s surface. Geoscientists can look at a colorful geologic map and immediately spot important pieces of the story of Earth’s geologic history. For instance, in the map below, the red area found in Canada represents bedrock formed in the Late Archean Era […]
With a deluge of data — from data about climate change and the pandemic to data about town demographics and local energy use — it is increasingly vital that the public are able to make sense of data to inform their decisions. But datasets can be overwhelming, at least at first glance. For example, census […]
It used to be that natural disasters like wildfires, floods, and hurricanes each had their own season, likely to occur in predictable locations and at certain times of the year. Changes in the climate have expanded and shifted both the map of where people may be at risk and the months when these hazards most […]
Our Multilevel Computational Modeling collaborative project with Michigan State University has developed a novel theoretical framework based on a literature review of modeling, systems thinking (ST) and computational thinking (CT). The framework, which was also informed by years of work developing our SageModeler systems modeling software and researching student modeling, highlights how both ST and […]