Designing to illuminate children's scientific funds of knowledge through social media sharing

Kelly Mills, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Tamara Clegg, June Ahn, Jason Yip, Daniel Pauw, Lautaro Cabrera, Kenna Hernly, Caroline Pitt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The ubiquitous use of social media by children offers a unique opportunity to view diverse funds of knowledge that may otherwise be overlooked. To leverage this insight, we have coupled the iterative development of our community focused, Science Everywhere life-relevant science learning program together with an integrated social media app to engage learners aged 6-16 in science with parents, teachers, and mentors throughout their community. We found that learners' scientific funds of knowledge were often not evident in their posts alone; rather, they emerged through our triangulation of posts, interviews with youth and their parents, and observations of their learning experiences in our life-relevant science education program. Our findings suggest that leveraging new social media features to support contextual information, scientific scaffolds and creative expression may make children's implicit and more unconventional scientific funds of knowledge more apparent. Additionally, social media sharing in conjunction with other practices, such as discussing posts with learners and encouraging non-science posts, can uncover the rich contexts of children's social media sharing, which can illuminate their scientific thinking.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIDC 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages266-277
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450351522
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 19 2018
Event17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC 2018 - Trondheim, Norway
Duration: Jun 19 2018Jun 22 2018

Publication series

NameIDC 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Other

Other17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC 2018
Country/TerritoryNorway
CityTrondheim
Period6/19/186/22/18

Keywords

  • Children
  • Science learning
  • Scientific funds of knowledge
  • Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Education
  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Designing to illuminate children's scientific funds of knowledge through social media sharing'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this