How Embodiment Helps Students Explain Their Ideas Within an MR Environment and Content Interviews

Abstract

In this paper, we explored young children’s embodied representation of states of matter after engaging in a mixed-reality environment where students explored states of matter by acting as particles (Danish et al., 2020). To examine how embodiment may play a role in helping students’ explanations, we analyzed students' performance in assessments to explore how embodiment helps young children represent their ideas and found they were able to use a combination of talk and embodiment to provide more detailed explanations. Then we further explored how students formed these conceptual understandings in the MR environment and applied interaction analysis to analyze how embodiment played a role in the process. The results showed that gestures students used in the post-assessment emerged through their collective embodiment in the classroom.