Indoor positioning technology and enhanced engagement in early elementary systems thinking and science learning

Indoor positioning (IP) technology is sought after for applications in gaming, commercial spaces, and education. While several types of IP systems have become available, none offer tracking of multiple agents that balances high accuracy with low cost. This paper highlights new 3D IP technology designed for educational contexts, which coordinates as few as 4 and as many as 80 physical “tags.” The tags act both as anchors to delineate the play space and as trackers that send high-accuracy location data to a server in real time that can later be played back. To test the impact of the technology on learning, we compared it to a parallel non-IP environment that approximates locations between two points in classroom settings. Findings demonstrate how the IP technology supports students in engaging deeply with complex systems concepts that require students to look closely at the local behavior of an organism such as an ant.