When children engage in play, they develop essential skills like creativity, flexibility, imagination, and problem-solving. Children who engage in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) activities also build similar skills. Both play and STEAM enable children to ask questions, try different solutions, and develop explanations for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper reporting an exploratory pilot study is to examine how participant engagement in design thinking varies when playing and fixing (playfixing) three partially complete games (broken games). Design/methodology/approach: The data for this study consist of transcripts of five playfixing sessions with a total of 16…

Background: In light of the growing need to understand interactive learning effectivity and especially post-COVID 19 pandemic constraints, the key question is how to develop interactive videos in order to get the most effective results. Objectives: This research aims to explore the pedagogical benefits of interactive video with branching…

This article reports on an empirical study that investigates the way students' performance in solving arithmetical tasks may be related to their performance in solving algebraic tasks. The sample consisted of 203 Grade 6 students. The arithmetical tasks involved arithmetical expressions with known quantities, whereas the algebraic tasks involved…

Hackathons in education are increasingly recognized for their immersive learning experiences, emphasizing problem-solving and diverse innovation. Despite their acknowledged role in curricular innovation, there remains a gap in understanding their impact on student learning outcomes. This study employs the PRISMA methodology to evaluate the impact…

STEM education and research has gained popularity internationally over the last decade. However, there is a lack in specifications in existing K-12 STEM classroom observation protocols of how features of an integrated STEM experience/lesson would lead to desired outcomes and how those outcomes should be measured. To bridge this gap, we propose the…

Years of failed attempts to engage my mathematics teacher students in exploration and co-creation led me to radically change my teaching approach. Inspired by literature that uses the jazz improv metaphor for teaching, I derived three tenets based on principles from jazz improv. First, I would bring no more than a single problem-solving task to…

This article elucidates a nuanced methodology to embed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within engineering curricula, grounded in the tenets of the CDIO Standard 3 framework. Given the heightened emphasis on sustainability within contemporary industrial contexts, there is an imperative demand for engineers endowed with sophisticated…

These educators share the "how" and "why" behind their use of open middle tasks in the classroom. In this article, the authors share a type of mathematics task, called Open Middle, that exhibits the characteristics outlined above. The authors frequently use Open Middle tasks in their classrooms because they teach students that…

Educational digital escape games (EDEGs) are digital versions of escape rooms where players solve puzzles and complete challenges to achieve educational goals. This study investigates the effects of EDEGs on the academic achievement and motivation of elementary school students in mathematics. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-method design, 45…

Communication theory can be challenging to teach in an engaging manner. The following original teaching activity suggests a way to incorporate the phenomenon of escape rooms into your theory classroom. Courses: Communication Theory, Introduction to Communication. Objectives: In this activity, students will apply the basic tenets of several…

This study examined the engagement of preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) with mathematics tasks that were open in various ways and to varying extents. In K-12 settings, practitioners who have implemented recently popular open tasks report increased engagement and from a wider variety of students. While these anecdotal reports and related…

In this dissertation I explore instructors' work with instructional tasks as they plan to introduce various representations of derivatives. Drawing on the notion of "framing" from sociology, I adopt a situative lens to study calculus instructors' planning of instructional tasks. I rely on Herbst and Chazan's (2012) notion of…

As problems become increasingly complex, science educators need to better understand how new knowledge is constructed and applied in heterogeneous team collaborations, and how to teach students to productively engage in these processes. We discuss the emergence of insights in collaborative sensemaking and suggest a model that articulates the…

With the growing attention directed towards ChatGPT and its applications in education, this study explored its impact on various variables pertaining to student learning. Specifically, an integrated theoretical framework was used to investigate the factors that influence student problem-solving and critical thinking abilities when using ChatGPT…