This study expands on the concept of outreach programs: museum initiatives that look for ways to reach and share knowledge outside their installations, often to schools. We aim to study approaches for the development of content for a history museum outreach program using digital technologies. The significance of this lies in investigating ways to…

Working with language-independent logic structures can help students develop both inductive and deductive reasoning skills. The Japanese publisher Nikoli (with resources available both in print and online) produces a treasure trove of language-independent logic puzzles. The Nikoli print resources are mostly in Japanese, creating the extra…

Escape rooms are an increasingly popular puzzle game, and educators have started implementing them in classrooms. This paper will describe the motivations and implementation of escape-room-like puzzles in an undergraduate cryptography course, including how the open-source mathematics software system SageMath is used. In addition, there is a…

In this article, play is understood as activities of major importance for child-citizens and as activities that constitute various ways of participating. The researcher joined children in three early childhood education institutions in Norway in their activities and categorised their participation in their everyday life. The study depicts that, in…

In this article, I present a collection of puzzles appropriate for use in a variety of undergraduate courses, along with suggestions for relevant discussion. Logic puzzles and riddles have long been sources of amusement for mathematicians and the general public alike. I describe the use of puzzles in a classroom setting, and argue for their use as…

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This…

Problem-solving skills in creative, open-ended domains are both important and little understood. These domains are generally ill-structured, have extremely large exploration spaces, and require high levels of specialized skill in order to produce quality solutions. We investigate problem-solving behavior in one such domain, the…

Spanish learners engaged in two-way interaction gap tasks where, through social interaction, they identified and defined low-frequency vocabulary. Participants (referred to as actors to differentiate them from task partners) completed two such tasks. Each time, they collaborated with different partners of varying degrees of Spanish proficiency and…

Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children's relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from…

This case study provides an overview of an Action Research project that examines effective instruction-giving in the language classroom. The case describes each of the various phases of the Action Research cycle from identifying a researchable pedagogic puzzle or critical incident, collecting and analyzing classroom data about it, bringing about…

Children in Georgian and Victorian times were expected to be familiar with the geography of England and Wales. This study analyses some of the resources then available which taught children this information. John Aikin's "England Delineated" is evaluated as a geographical text and then compared with less formal games and puzzles, then on…

Background: Typical scaffolding coding schemes provide overall scores to compare across a sample. As such, insights into the scaffolding process can be obscured: the child's contribution to the learning; the particular skills being taught and learned; and the overall changes in amount of scaffolding over the course of the task. Aims: This study…

This work is an exploration of upper elementary students' sense making around four conventional representations of function: equations with algebraic notation, Cartesian graphs, function tables, and natural language. The cornerstone to the empirical work is a task called the Function Puzzle, where students are given 16 cards representing four…

The Inclusive Assessment of Computational Thinking (CT) designed for accessibility and learner variability was studied in over 50 classes in US schools (grades 3-8). The validation studies of IACT sampled thousands of students to establish IACT's construct and concurrent validity as well as test-retest reliability. IACT items for each CT practice…

Vocabulary plays an important role in the Content-Based classroom, making EFL Students' science vocabulary knowledge critical to their content understanding. The purpose of this action research was to enhance students' science vocabulary knowledge of 9th grade students through science vocabulary crossword puzzle (SVCP) practices. The research…