An android application named SmartChem was developed to explain multiple representations of acid-base chemistry. This paper is a description of an android-based media (SmartChem) through the stages of design, development, validation and revision, and finally, limited trials with pre-service science teachers. SmartChem is intended to aid students…

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…

The importance of this research is the use of WhatsApp in physics instruction beyond the classroom. This study evaluated the content of conversations in a in a class-wide WhatsApp group of high-school physics students (e.g., the goals of the conversations, topics of conversation, the hours at which conversations were conducted, and who…

Over the past 25 years, the Davidson College Physics Department has developed small computer programs called Physlets. These programs were written in Java and distributed as Java applets embedded in HTML pages. Physics teachers from around the world used Physlets to author interactive computer-based curricular materials for the teaching of…

So far relatively little research in education has explored the pedagogical and learning potentials of applications (Apps) on tablet PCs (TPCs). Drawing upon research on learning technologies and taking an embodied perspective, this study first identified educational functionalities of TPCs and generated guidelines to design educational Apps for…

Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) and SRI International conducted an independent study of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) KIDS "Play & Learn Science" app, which includes in-app and direct hands-on science explorations for children ages 3 to 6 and their parents. This study explored the impact of the PBS KIDS "Play…

Elementary science is chock-full of wonderful experiences for students. Do children see iPads as a tool for learning about science? Using Prensky (2010) as a guide, the researchers decided to see if "assessing students with their own" tools (p.178) using iPad apps would support learning discrete knowledge for electricity and light…

This study describes efforts to apply principles of systematic knowledge representation (concept mapping and computer-based semantic networking techniques) to the domain of ecology. A set of 24 relationships and modifiers is presented that seem sufficient for describing all ecological relationships discussed in an introductory course. Many of…

A "Xenograde system" is an imaginary science system. As an imaginary science, it contains a set of concepts and principles which mimic many of the concepts and principles found in physics and other physical sciences. Xenograde is a highly complex closed system which simulates the movement of satellites orbiting a nucleus and some small particles…