During this phase, students participated in an embodied modeling activity in which they acted as butterflies foraging for nectar. A photo of the classroom setup during this activity, and students conducting this activity is shown in Figure 1. Each student was given either a tall or short plastic straw that represented a butterfly’s proboscis. Artificial flowers of two different stem lengths, short and tall, were placed in plastic jars throughout the classroom. Small glass beads represented energy in a discrete, tangible form. At the beginning of this activity, beads
were placed in plastic cups to represent flower energy and each student was given a carrying pouch with fifteen beads to represent their starting energy. Students either deposited or collected beads to or from the plastic cups (i.e., flowers), depending on their foraging actions. Students gained 5 units of energy if they were able to drink nectar (i.e. their proboscis was able to ‘reach’
the nectar in the flowers) and lost one unit of energy for every step they had to take during foraging. At the end of every forage––once students reached the intended flower and collected beads from it––the student would calculate the net energy lost or gained on a printed data sheet by first subtracting from their total energy the energy it took to reach the intended flower and then adding back the energy they gained from drinking from it. Students’ actions during this activity represented “agent-level” rules of the ABMs that were later introduced in Phase 3, described below.
Figure 1: Students participating in Phase I’s Embodied Modeling Activity
Previous research by Danish and colleagues highlight the importance of constraining the interactions between students and the simulated physical environment during the embodied modeling activity. They found that this is essential in order to enable students to maintain focus
on key aspects of the target phenomenon, relevant to the learning objectives. In Danish’s work, the focal learning goals were to understand how bees communicate with each other, and how their communication affects emergent behaviors of hives around nectar. In an early version of this work, the goal for students acting as “bees” during the embodied modeling activity was to collect as much nectar as possible (Peppler et al., 2010), however, the authors found that the students cheated to win by collecting nectar as quickly as possible, instead of spending adequate time on communicating with other bees. As Danish (2014) pointed out, remedying this situation involved redesigning the activity by changing the rules of the game, so that students worked in pairs to hide nectar and then create a dance to communicate the nectar location to their peers, who would then search for the indicated location. That is, the activity more explicitly highlighted communicating with bees––the target learning goal––as an agent (or student)-level action that was necessary in order to complete the game.
Based on this body of work, we designed actions, performed by students-as-agents, interwoven with reflection that supported the intended learning goals of familiarizing students with the various “agent-level” elements of the ecosystem such as flower location, depth of the nectar sacs, and proboscis length (Table 2). Some of the rules and actions (e.g., losing energy due to travel, and gaining energy due to food intake) were designed to leverage students’
intuitive understanding of the relationship of energy and physical activity. Reflection was woven into the activity through the form of energy data sheets, wherein students actively recorded their steps taken (energy lost) and their nectar intake (energy gained) to maintain a running total of their change in energy over time.
Table 2: Agent-level Rules and Variables Introduced to Students in the Embodied Modeling Activities
Variable Rules of the System
Energy 1. Each step toward a flower costs one unit of energy 2. Each flower gives 5 units of energy
Flower Location 1. Far away flowers cost more energy 2. Close flowers cost less energy
Flower Length 1. Nectar in tall flowers is difficult to collect 2. Nectar in short flowers is easy to collect
Proboscis Length 1. Short Proboscises can only drink from short flowers 2. Long proboscises can drink from any flower
It is important to note that during the embodied modeling activity, the need to move from embodied actions to recording vital information on a data sheet did not disrupt students’
immersive experience as agents within the system. Students recorded the relevant data as it happened, and it did not require students to give up their butterfly persona, although some students found jotting and foraging at the same time initially disruptive. The teacher and the researchers strongly believed that interweaving action and reflection was central to achieving the learning objectives of thinking like an agent. Therefore, to help students who expressed such difficulties, they explained that if the student did not know how much energy she or he had at the beginning of each forage, she or he would not be able to make decisions about foraging
appropriately, and this could in turn result in death. This clarification helped frame the jottings of their energy gains and losses as an integral part of the embodied modeling experience.
Students completed two separate iterations of this activity. After each iteration students created bar graphs of their energy, described in the next section. In the second iteration, each student was provided with a straw of a different length (compared to the first day), and was asked to begin their forage from a different starting position. By changing their initial starting location, our goal
was to make sure that students did not repeat their actions from the previous iteration. This, in turn, created opportunities for the students to reflect on the differences between the two iterations (see the section on Teacher-Researcher Partnerships), and necessitated a deeper engagement with the simulated physical environment.