Projects

Many educators want to contribute to action on pressing global problems, such as pandemics, climate change, and social justice, and in recent years this has come to include the need to help our students feel less worried and more empowered. A variety of curriculum approaches have addressed some of these issues, but often focusing on helping … … Continue reading →

SCORE is an online environment being developed by the ENCORE Lab that supports scripting and orchestration of complex collaborative learning experiences. Using SCORE, educators can design and control sequences of activities that are distributed to devices of individual students, small groups, and the whole class.

“Future Cities, Future Us” is a special climate action project of Urban Minds, 1UP Toronto, Evergreen, and ENCORE Lab at OISE. Our climate is changing. The City of Toronto recently declared a climate emergency, but this will mean nothing if we don’t change the way we design and build our cities. This project is designed … … Continue reading →

Tangible and embodied technologies hold great promise for supporting exciting new forms of personal activity and social interaction. The computer is beginning to disappear into its physical and social surrounds. Examples of such technologies include physical computing (e.g., Arduino microcontrollers), geo-locational services (e.g., FourSquare or Google Glass), personal health technologies (e.g., Fitbit or Jawbone), and computer … … Continue reading →

The Encore Lab is using the Embedded Phenomena (EP) and the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) frameworks to investigate technologies designed to foster collaborative knowledge construction in elementary science classrooms. In EP environments, a media-rich representation of a scientific phenomena is mapped on to the physical space of a classroom for an extended period of time. … … Continue reading →

Rock, Paper, Awesome (RPA) was Encore Lab’s initial foray into developing the means for tangible and embodied interactions that would connect to our S3 technology framework. The goal for RPA was simple; individual labs could create their own unique tangible or embodied interactions through which they played rock, paper, scissors with other labs that were physically … … Continue reading →

PLACE (Physics Learning Across Contexts and Environments) is a 13-week high school physics curriculum in which students capture examples of physics in the world around them (through pictures, videos, or open narratives), which they then explain, tag, and upload to a shared social space. Within this knowledge community, peers are free to respond, debate, and vote on the … … Continue reading →

Hunger Games is a learning environment designed to support upper elementary learners’ construction of understandings of animal foraging behaviors. It is an educational research project lead by Tom Moher’s research group at the University or Illinois Chicago (UIC). In Hunger Games, learners enact animal foraging within the context of a sequence of increasingly complex simulated … … Continue reading →

What happens when you combine eleven grade six students, one master teacher, an embedded phenomena simulation called HelioRoom (Moher et al., 2005; Moher, 2008), five Motorola Xoom tablets with a custom built app that enable students to share their observations and theories with their peers and teacher on an shared display?  We began investigating this question earlier this … … Continue reading →

EvoRoom is an immersive, room-sized simulation of a rainforest ecosystem modelled after Borneo in Southeast Asia.  Designed as part of the evolution and biodiversity unit of a Grade 11 Biology course, it situates co-located students in a simulated rainforest and engages them in a collective inquiry activity. Implemented within a “smart classroom” research environment, the … … Continue reading →

Common Knowledge (CK) is a pedagogical and technological innovation designed to guide knowledge community-driven science inquiry; and support collaboration across individual, small group, and whole-community social levels (Stahl, 2013) of a classroom.  The technological aspect of CK is a multi-modal (e.g., tablets, laptops, interactive whiteboards) web-based discourse tool that visually represents a knowledge community’s ideas, … … Continue reading →

Climate change is a SSHRC funded-project that examined students learning and teacher’s role in the Knowledge and Community Inquiry (KCI) model – a blended model of scaffolded inquiry within a knowledge community approach. Based on the KCI design principle, we, in collaboration with a teacher, co-designed a grade 9 sciences curriculum unit on the topic … … Continue reading →