Mixed Reality Environments as Collaborative and Constructive Learning Spaces for Elementary School Children

Abstract. Learning is an active, constructive and collaborative process, where people construct knowledge from their experiences in the world. People construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they engage in constructing personally meaningful products, that is meaningful to themselves or to others around them. The construction of knowledge from experiences in the world seems to be especially important in childhood learning, as children need to learn through their senses and through physical activity. Unfortunately, for school children there are few learning situations where senses and physical activity is involved. This is partly due to the nature of the concepts to be learned and partly to the lack of manipulative learning material. This contribution introduces a mixed reality environment as a collaborative and constructive learning space for elementary school children. During recent teaching experiments in an elementary school children created their own mixed reality environment which served from a scientific point of view for a semiotic-based understanding for the creation and usage of physical and digital media bringing together arts and computer science.