I will be presenting work from the SiMSAM and DataSketch projects at the Modeling and Model-Based Reasoning in STEM Conference August 26-27, 2016 at Purdue University. My talk abstract is below; for more information visit the conference website.
In this presentation, I will describe and share data from two ongoing projects that each seek to introduce young students to the practice of scientific modeling by building on familiar expressive activities like sketching and flip book animation. SiMSAM and DataSketch invite middle school students to create, revise, and test their own scientific models – expressed as computational simulations or data visualizations – using their own sketches and animations as starting points. We are exploring how such tools (1) allow youth the representational flexibility needed for them to truly engage as *authors* of scientific models, while also (2) structuring those ideas so that students’ models can be compared and contrasted with one another, and with conventional scientific models. I will describe the technological, material, and social supports we have found that make complex, computationally-mediated modeling possible in the middle school classroom. I will also briefly describe some emerging theoretical and practical implications of this work for teacher education and theories of learning in modeling-rich classrooms.