Mittuniversitetet

This article sets out to discuss physical prerequisites for creativity. Creativity has come to be regarded as one of the most valuable attributes a person can have, at least in today’s Western societies. This article builds on and incorporates material from a Swedish project called Entrepreneurship Liminal space, Creativity, and Understanding. The article covers analysis from interviews and video observations from two different milieus especially planned for creativity. Based on observations and interviews, the article’s goal is to emphasize and discuss the importance of understanding the physical aspects of creativity. Theoretically, the paper highlights the theory of affordances through an underlying theoretical intention is the way of regarding children as agents. Most significantly, this study contributes to the development of knowledge and understanding about how educators in schools, museums, and other educational institutions can create prerequisites for creativity. 

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the European Union’s strategies both set goals for solving environmental challenges faced by societies and communities. As part of solving these challenges, both the UN and the EU stress the development of entrepreneurial and innovative education. Teacher education plays a crucial role in these efforts, since teachers and teacher educators have a significant impact on educating citizens far into the future. In this research, we studied how Nordic (Finnish, Swedish, and Icelandic) primary teacher education curricula involve entrepreneurial, sustainable, and pro-environmental education. For this study, the authors analyzed the B.Ed. curricula of three academic teacher education institutions in Spring 2021. We used qualitative content analysis as our research method. According to the results, all three curricula incorporated both entrepreneurship education and sustainable development to some extent, although often not very explicitly. Given the urgency of problems such as global climate change, the educational goals and contents in these curricula related to entrepreneurial education and sustainable development are very limited. The idea of integrating environmental/sustainable and entrepreneurship education could be promoted in the future more explicitly, with these interdisciplinary educational themes emphasised more strongly in the curricula and education policies.

Location-based games has enabled new opportunities for augmenting the traditional learning space. In a time where most students have their own smartphones, the concept of bringing your own device (BYOD) seems promising in educational settings as well. However, playing by random in augmented reality environments will not automatically bring curriculum-aligned learning outcomes. This chapter analyses and discusses how the combination of BYOD and augmented reality gaming might be scaffolded to support collaborative curriculum-aligned learning. The overall research strategy was a case study approach with Affordance theory, Social Constructivism and BYOD as theoretical assumptions for a deductive analysis. The case units were two outdoor sessions for middle school students with curriculum-aligned assignments in Mathematics and Social Science solved by playing the augmented reality game Pokémon GO. Data have been collected by video recordings of the outdoor sessions with spy glasses and a handheld camera. Results indicate that the augmented reality environment stimulates active learning, but that there like in traditional learning, is a need for scaffolding to achieve the stated learning outcomes.  

GPS-equipped smartphones have enabled the construction of location-based games. In augmented reality (AR), fantasy worlds are mapped to real-world settings. Two location-based AR games that use historical markers as points of interest are Ingress and Pokémon GO. This chapter describes and discusses how PokéStop statues in Pokémon GO can be used in primary school outdoor sessions. A case study was conducted on how fifth-grade students learned about local history, social sciences and humanities during game sessions. Findings suggest that AR could be an inspiring  extension in educational settings, if activities are aligned to the surroundings and learning objectives and outdoor gaming activities are followed up in more traditional classroom sessions.

This study discusses the inclusion of location-based games and mobile devices in an educational setting that embraces both indoor and outdoor sessions. The study was built on a framework including learning as a social and collaborative phenomenon. Two case units, in terms of a 5th grade Social Science class and a 6th grade Mathematics class, were included in the study. Each case unit embraced an indoor preparing session, an outdoor session including mobile devices and the location-based game Pokémon GO, and an indoor follow-up session. The chapter aims at contributing to the understanding of how students and teachers together, in an emergent practice of orchestrating learning, apply mobile devices and location-based games in their educational setting. From this aim, the following research question unfolds: How could location-based games and mobile devices be applied by students and teachers to orchestrate learning in middle school settings? Data were gathered by semi-structured group interviews and video recordings with 20 students and two teachers. Moreover, documents such as lesson plans were included in the dataset. In the study, it was found that students and teachers participated in a shared and emerging practice of orchestrating learning and teaching. In this practice students and teachers acted as co-designers to orchestrate the application of location-based games and mobile devices in the educational setting. Findings suggest that an orchestration including a combination of a collaborative approach to learning, location-based games and activities that embrace outdoor and indoor sessions has the potential to vitalise and enhance traditional classroom-based education. However, there is not a guarantee that all students will concentrate on the given task, and just as in an ordinary classroom setting, teaching and learning also require careful orchestration. 

This chapter discusses the potential that wearable technologies have for studying and understanding how people learn. In particular, the focus is on how spy glasses can be used as a tool for collecting data from educational situations. The chapter report from two different cases performed by the authors in which spy glasses were used, including considerations made from a methodological point of view. From the first case a conclusion is that spy-glass recording made it possible to closely follow teaching and learning during science labwork and find specific elements not found in video data from ordinary video cameras. The second case reports on valuable information about how the motivation for learning works in young children. Drawing further from these studies, the study elaborate on themes that arise as central to video research: ethics, technology and methodology as well as selection and analysis. The chapter discusses a transformation in how childhood is considered in relation to new technology. Here children are seen as more active and participatory in the shaping of their own childhoods. This can also result in developing new research methods in order to understand and visualise the child’s perspective, and using wearable technologies could certainly be one of these areas. In other words, it is a unique perspective when participants are co-creators of research studies. This implies important future work ahead, developing and applying wearable technologies for education and educational research.