BME HealthReach is an educational outreach program where undergraduate BME students participate in an out-of-class design thinking course to create and teach interactive STEM activities to K-12 students, where children with chronic illnesses are the primary clients. We detail research that seeks to answer the following: (1) what impact does this…

Research around problem solving in collaborative groups has made progress, but several conceptual and methodological issues remain. These issues include the appropriate choices of units of analysis; the ability of current theoretical sets of macrocognition codes to capture group dynamics; detection and identification of potentially emergent…

My dissertation explores how elicited gestures can support 6th grade students' understanding of nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. My hypothesis is that elicited gestures make these patterns salient to the student, who learns about these quantitative dynamics via embodied mechanisms. To elicit these gestures, I designed a computer simulation…

This study proposes a local theory called "Inside-Outside" to strengthen a deprived school microsystem. The theory aims to reduce the cycle of ignorance in schools with poor infrastructure facilities, large groups of students, located in high-crime areas, children from low-income families with low levels of schooling, and families unable…

In 2013 Hedmark University College conducted a research project where students from a game development project/study program developed and tested a Pervasive Game for learning as part of a class in System Thinking. The overall game goal was to teach Sustainability through System Thinking, and to give the students a real world experience with their…

The understanding of complex, dynamic and animate systems has a special standing in education for sustainable development and biology. Thus one important role of science teacher education is to promote student teachers' Content Related Knowledge (CRK) for teaching systems thinking, consisting of extensive Content Knowledge (CK) and well formed…