Abstract: Understanding and solving the problems of the cities of the future will require an understanding of the complex and interdependent systems that drive them. This includes the relationships between industrialization, energy needs, pollution, and a population's health and happiness; the food needs of a growing populace and how to supply it; developing and maintaining trade agreements and political alliances; and even the natural geographical advantages of certain cities. To understand these relationships requires learners to engage in learning that encompasses and connects a range of disciplinary knowledge, including science, math, economics, civics, and history. To this end, we introduce City Settlers, a whole class, embodied and immersive simulation that transforms the physical classroom into a landscape in which groups of students build and sustain their own growing cities. To succeed, students must work with (or against) other cities in the room, to grow their industries and population, while managing their population's health and happiness. Having already successfully piloted City Settlers in four grade 5-8 science and history classes, this project will aim to co-design with middle school teachers a more robust version, expanding its across a diversity of schools settings and cross-disciplinary classrooms. Three questions will guide this work: 1) How can City Settlers help learners enact and understand complex cross-disciplinary systems at urban scales in physical classrooms? 2) How does supporting students in seamlessly transition between different forms of working together - collaboratively, in parallel, and competitively – enable them to make sense of complex systems in different ways? 3) How can multimodal learning analytics data be used to identify different kinds of co-work and co-participation, and support the teacher in making real-time orchestrational decisions? [Publications] Kim, T., Kumar, V., & Tissenbaum, M. B. (2021). Productive anger? Changing systems understanding due to negative emotions. In 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2021, 1141-1142. Kumar, V., Tissenbaum, M. B., & Kim, T. (2021). Procedural Collaboration in Educational Games: Supporting Complex System Understandings in Immersive Whole Class Simulations. Communication Studies, 72(6), 994-1016.
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