WIP: Leveraging Learning Analytics to Explore Elementary Students Collaboration and Affect in Engineering Design Challenges

This research work-in-progress paper reports on a proof of concept trial of an augmented reality learning platform that aims to unobtrusively capture elementary students' collaborative actions and affective states. With the growing push to integrate engineering education in K-12 settings, elementary teachers and students face many implementation challenges. In particular, while engineering design projects can serve as a context for developing collaborative skills, younger students might find open-ended projects where working with others who have different views than their own especially difficult. Such projects may also force young students to contend with several emotions. In this space, we propose MindLabs, an augmented reality platform for engaging in integrated science and engineering design projects. In a pilot study 216 elementary students on teams completed a lesson on forces and motions which ended with a two-day design challenge. While students interacted with the system, their collaborative actions and use of the affective state reporting tool were captured. Using learning analytics and more specifically exploratory data visualization, we present three cases that demonstrate positive and negative collaboration dynamics and affect reporting differences. We discuss how the results relate to past research on collaboration dynamics, affect and conflict and how these analytics could support teachers to identify and assist different groups of students. We conclude with future steps for this project.