A Visuo-spatial Learning Ecosystem Enhances Adaptive Expertise with Preparation for Future Learning

The progress of groups of minds in interaction with each other, or the properties of the interaction between individual minds and artifacts in the world, are frequently at the heart of intelligent human performance. (Hutchins, 1993) Abstract1 Education processes in our classrooms too often fail to engage children's interests, and instead come across as boring or irrelevant. Both of these challenges are harvested in an educational experiment that involves the largest dam removal project in US history. The driving question revolves around a shaping of learning experiences for children with the aid of an advanced graphing calculator in an informal environment. This study investigates how learning is triggered by an event that deeply engages learners, offering affordances that are typically missing from inert sequences of learning in everyday classrooms. We studied sixteen teenagers who undertook scientific investigations in STEM-related comprehension, in the watershed and drainage basin of the Elwha River System. This research project establishes a baseline that foreshadows a longitudinal study addressing the learning outcomes that occur (i) before, (ii) during, and (iii) after the dam