Learning through Creating Artefacts for Outdoor Settings with Smartzoos Application: Students Challenges and Experiences

摘要

Different outdoor locations, for instance, zoos can be turned into interesting authentic learning settings with the help of mobile applications, where learners can practice scientific thinking, explore concepts and relations through combining existing or creating entirely new physical and digital artefacts (Price, 2007). Mobile technologies bring along a set of different phenomena to education such as connectivity, context sensitivity, mobility, personalisation and collaboration (Liu, Scordino, et al., 2014) allowing new ways of socializing, knowledge acquisition (Looi, Song & Wong, 2012) as well as expanding learners’ control and ownership over goals and learning experiences (Sharples, 2007). The concept learning through creating is not new and similar concepts such as learning through the authoring of user-generated content (Fitzgerald, 2012, etc.), learning through making (Hsu, Baldwin, Ching, 2017), learner as a creator and designer (Slussareff & Bohácková, 2016), learning through collaboratively constructing artifacts of various kind (ideas, practices, models, representations, etc.) (Paavola, Engeström & Hakkarainen, 2012) have emerged. The aforementioned approaches emphasise learners as active participants in knowledge building, in which learning happens through curation, modification or authoring digital or physical artifacts individually or in groups.