A small group of interested upper secondary education students participated in a workshop where they created a particle-based physics engine and used the engine to implement a hanging cloth simulation and a two-dimensional heat diffusion model of their own creation. During the implementation of their models, learning opportunities present…

The study aims to examine fourth-grade private and public-school students' images of the science learning environment using their drawings. The survey was conducted in the 2017-2018 academic year, and a descriptive survey model was used. Participant group of this study consist of 357 fourth-grade students. In this study, data were collected by…

Chemistry teaching learning is considered as difficult and boring. The definition of play, based on authors such as Freud, Piaget and Vigotsky, is presented as a stimulating, pleasant and voluntary activity that in the student facilitates his learning and encompasses the different facets of his physical, psychic, social and emotional development.…

We present the analysis of the planetarium usage survey (PLUS), a two-part, mixed-methods initial study investigating planetarium use in the U.S. by undergraduate learners. Seventy-seven planetariums situated on college or university campuses within the U.S. completed an online survey during the fall of 2018 with 11 of those participating in…

Bibliometric mapping serves as a method to systematically evaluate and visually demonstrate the development of a research field. CiteSpace and VOSviewer, two research tools of bibliometric mapping, were used in the present study to analyze, synthesize, and visualize the hot topics as well as frontier evolution of science education. Co-authorship…

Central to evolution is the concept of a common ancestry from which all life has emerged over immense time scales, but learning and teaching temporal aspects of evolution remain challenging. This study investigated students' interpretation of evolutionary time when engaging with a multi-touch tabletop application called DeepTree, a dynamic…

This article explores how creative visual imagination and creative thinking can help children to construct mental models of space. A mixed-method study, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and involving 98 five-year-old children (54 girls and 44 boys) demonstrated that creative visual imagination, rather than creative thinking, is…

This paper describes how an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) Classroom in a secondary school in Singapore is used to enhance learning through visualization and deepen understanding of science and increase interest and enjoyment in science. The VR Classroom is a futuristic classroom that taps the affordances of VR and AR to enhance HCI…

In this work, we describe an educational approach based on augmented reality (AR) and mobile technology that has been developed with the aim to engage students in a learning procedure regarding the electric forces as well as Coulomb's Law. Initially, we present the AR learning environment and we explain its design principles with respect to the…

The purpose of this design based research study was to better understand and build from students' perceptual experiences of visual representations of the greenhouse effect. Twenty undergraduate students were interviewed as they engaged with an online visualization for the learning of the greenhouse effect. We found that, even though all students…

Gross anatomy is located in a three-dimensional space. Visualizing aspects of structures in gross anatomy education should aim to provide information that best resembles their original spatial proportions. Stereoscopic three-dimensional imagery might offer possibilities to implement this aim, though some research has revealed potential impairments…

According to variation theory, it is essential to enable students to focus on the object of learning and discern its critical features, but the features that "it is possible" to discern often depend on the equipment used. Thus, in labs, the experimental technologies used may shape students' experience of focal phenomena, in a…

Spatial ability predicts success in STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) fields, particularly chemistry. This paper reports two studies investigating the unique contribution of mental rotation ability to spatial thinking in a STEM discipline. Using authentic disciplinary tasks from chemistry, we show that the difficulty of a…

The technological advancement and rapid development of artificial intelligence have led to a growing number of studies investigating pedagogical innovations incorporated with emerging technologies in this digital era. An increasing amount of empirical evidence has suggested the potential benefits of incorporating digital technologies and…

Hands-on digital interactivity in science centers provides new communicative opportunities. The "Microcosmos" multi-touch table allows visitors to interact with 64 image "cards" of (sub)microscopic biological structures and processes embedded across seven theme categories. This study presents the integration of biological…