Abstract

In this innovative demonstration session, participants will be engaged in a series of highly interactive, technologically supported, participatory simulations. Participatory simulations are activities where learners act out the roles of individual elements of a system and then see how the behavior of the system as a whole can emerge from these individual behaviors. During this session the emergent behavior of the system and its relation to individual participant actions and strategies will be discussed and analyzed by participants. The technology supports both the running of the simulation – the interactive role-playing – and the analysis of the results at a local and “collective” level. The session will close with group reflection and discussion. The discussion will center both on the participants response to working in this highly interactive way and on theoretical and methodological research issues provoked by trying to make sense of learning in this new medium.

The technology that enables these activities, HubNet (Wilensky and Stroup, 1999), consists of a network of handheld devices or computers (the “nodes”) connected by a wireless or wired network to an upfront computer (the “hub”). The activities are authored using the NetLogo modeling language. We have been using this technology in middle school and high school classrooms over the past four years. This affordable, classroom network technology has been developed with support from NSF and in conjunction with Texas Instruments. The proposed demonstration will use computers as the HubNet nodes. We will conduct two participatory simulations: one related to disease propagation and one related to controlling traffic in a simulated city. We can support a large number of simultaneous participants and an unlimited number of observers. To facilitate the follow-up conversation, we will also ask participants to submit electronic response/discussion forms. These responses will be processed in near real time and projected for the entire group. The electronic submissions will include a combination of multiple choice responses (e.g., Likert-scale like responses) and open questions. We will use these responses to start a conversation and will also open the discussion to individual questions and observations.