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…

Purpose: Being "literate" is well established as key to active civic participation, right from the earliest years of life. Young children's natural curiosity and motivation to understand the world and their places within it through playful explorations offers rich opportunities for learning. Reported here are findings from a STEAM…

Taking into account the profound impact of technology on modern education, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing academic interest has focused towards the design and application of such tools on different learning contexts. A specific area of Human-Computer Interaction, called affordance theory, focuses on the perception, design and…

Young children encounter uncertainty and challenges on a daily basis; through their intuitions, experiences and experimentation they construct knowledge, skills and dispositions towards probabilistic concepts. The aim of this exploratory ethnographic study is to identify how young children engage with probabilistic thinking and reasoning while…

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational…

Today, schools are introducing STEM education and robotics to children in ever-lower grades. In "Beyond Coding," Marina Umaschi Bers lays out a pedagogical roadmap for teaching code that encompasses the cultivation of character along with technical knowledge and skills. Presenting code as a universal language, she shows how children…

To improve the teaching and learning materials for a curriculum it is important to incorporate the findings from educational research. In light of this, we present creative exercises and experiments to elicit, confront and resolve misconceptions in geometrical optics. Since ray diagrams can be both the cause and the solution for many…

This paper focusses on the process of learning mathematics in primary school from the perspectives of 62 girls aged seven to 11. For many of these Singaporean girls, English is not the dominant home language, but they all learn mathematics in English. Despite the fact that achievement in mathematics is high nationally, girls appear to be less…

"Making" is a rapidly emerging form of educational practice that involves the design, construction, testing, and revision of a wide variety of objects, using high and low technologies, and integrating a range of disciplines including art, science, engineering, and mathematics. It has garnered widespread interest and support in both…

Movement creativity is a key factor in motor development in children, yet very few exercise programs promote the development of motor creativity in children. To address this gap in the literature, this study tested the effectiveness of a creative exercise program on children's motor and cognitive creativity, and their probability of adaptation to…

What our century requires is an individual who can recognize and solve a problem, think in a critical manner, are productive, responsible, and open to innovation, and are capable of cooperating with others. The requirements of our era are also reflected on education. Education systems change and improve accordingly; thereby new education systems…

Many dance artists in their first encounters with improvisational dance making begin not only to learn how to compose spontaneously, but also to gain skills for coping with the uncertainties inherent in the form. This article suggests helpful dance scores for beginning students of physical improvisation and those who teach improvisational…

A qualitative study focusing on arts-based learning in Israel education was conducted at a community Jewish high school in North America. Building on studies that have shown students are able to simultaneously love and critique Israel, the purpose of the study was to assess whether producing creative work led to creative solutions to contemporary…

This study examines the role of spatial reasoning in learning among 5th and 6th grade students participating in a set of in-school, technology-enhanced, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) making activities. We focus our analysis on a particular type of reasoning: spatial reasoning. Prior research has shown that spatial…

The article discusses the integration of cartoons into a finite mathematics college course. However, cartoon integration is appropriate for any educational level STEM course. Students and the author used an online comic strip creator, MakeBeliefsComix.com, to create cartoons that connected concepts to the real world and history. Following Cho,…