What is SCY?
SCY is pronounced as "sky" and is short for "Science Created by You". The SCY project aims to innovate in science education in both didactical and technical aspects. From a didactical point of view, learning is centered on what we call Emerging Learning Objects (ELOs), in theoretically grounded learning schemes called scenarios. More about ELOs and scenarios can be found in the following paragraphs.
On the technical side, we have developed a flexible, adaptive and open-ended digital learning environment. This means that students may choose their own path through a mission – the SCY name for a lesson project – and that the environment adapts to their learning behavior. The learning environment is called SCY-Lab.
About scenarios, ELOs and missions
Scenario: pedagogical framework
A pedagogical scenario is a learning scheme: a series of interconnected learning activities. Scenarios can be long or short, simple or complicated, linear or flexible – either the student starts at activity 1 and then follows the numbers until the end, or the student has a certain degree of freedom in choosing his path. Of course, the teacher may always choose to limit or increase that freedom one way or the other.
A scenario is a purely didactical description of education: it doesn't contain any subject matter or actual lesson content. Examples of scenarios are:
1. The Design Challenge
2. Inquiry Learning
3. Collaborative Controversies
| The main ideas behind three examples of scenarios 1. The Design Challenge Students have to design an artifact, which represents a solution to a complex societal problem related to the students' own reality, e.g., designing a CO2 friendly house. This mission contextualizes all curricular activities and the science content to be learned. Starting from a complex problem, students are guided to identify multiple aspects of the issue and approach the problem through design. Taking on the design challenge, students iteratively design artifacts (or working models) and theoretical models, test, reflect upon and present the artifacts and the refined theoretical models with the goals to acquire science knowledge and skills. Some activities are classroom-wide, some are small group activities. The learners take on different aspects of the design task, e.g., through testing different variables, and present their findings in classroom-wide activities. 2. Inquiry Learning Students acquire scientific inquiry skills and domain-based knowledge through discovering relations between dependent and independent variables. They start from an every-day life problem, analyze the problem situation, and define research questions and hypotheses. Hypotheses are tested through real observations, experiments or simulations. Mobile devices like data loggers can be used for collecting data from a real environment or experimental situations. The scenario can have variations depending on the stages of inquiry applied in a particular case. 3. Collaborative controversies The collaborative controversies engage students in using controversial issues as a platform for exploring scientific and ethical facets. A controversial issue can constitute a suitable context for the students to engage in critical thinking and reflection. Reasoning about questions that are controversial and involve several facets both scientific and ethical may stimulate the learners' knowledge building process. A controversial issue is also well suited for facilitation of a collective discussion. The students can be organized in teams and discuss on an individual basis or find a common point of view and stay together as a group collectively arguing their view. Teams of students can then challenge each other with controversial questions (‘problems') that involve scientific and ethical reasoning. This collaboration on uncovering all aspects of a controversial issue may also help the students' knowledge building process. Hearing the point of view of others and gaining experience in discussing and collaborating may be beneficial to abilities like critical thinking and reflection. The students produce a solution to a problem, which could take the form of e.g. a presentation, a report or an information leaflet. |
Students perform activities and produce ELOs
Activities are the building blocks of scenarios. Some (sets of) activities are specific to certain scenarios, but many are used in different scenarios. For example, presentation and reflection activities are present in many different scenarios, whereas structured debating activities are crucial to the Collaborative Controversies scenario, but absent from The Design Challenge. In SCY, activities are clustered in coherent groups of activities, called Learning Activity Spaces (LASes).
An activity typically results in the production of a so-called emerging learning object: an ELO. An ELO can be anything from a list of ideas, meeting notes or a complete report to a dataset, a planning, a design sketch or a comment on somebody else's ELO. Every version of every ELO is saved by the system, and can be retrieved at will. A broad range of ELO types can be found in the list of ELOs in Table 1.
ELOs are the mortar that keeps the building blocks together. An activity results in an ELO, which is in turn needed as input for another activity, thereby stringing the two activities together.
In the SCY project, ELOs are leading: we see scenarios first and foremost as a set of ELOs to be produced. We have designed the learning environment accordingly, so that students navigate mainly on the basis of ELOs. ELOs are their goals; learning activities provide a means to achieve those goals.
In every scenario, some ELOs are more important than others. These more important ELOs, that define the scenario, are called anchor ELOs.
Mission: an actual education project
SCY education is structured in missions. A complete SCY lesson project, including the pedagogical framework of a scenario and the actual topic content, is called a mission. Like the scenarios they are based on, missions can be flexible or linear, simple or complicated, short or long. Missions are self-contained, in the respect that a student can find all the instruction, assignments, produced ELOs, cooperation tools, (links to) information et cetera within the mission.
In the SCY project, we have developed the following complete missions:
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Run for your life! (mini tutorial mission)
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Design a CO2-friendly house
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ECO mission
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A healthy pizza
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Forensic mission
Using the SCY authoring tools, the teacher can tweak these missions to fit his own specific situation. Further on in this manual, we have included (much) more information about the existing SCY missions (in the chapter about SCY missions), as well as about authoring (paragraph 3.3). To illustrate the type of activities a student may do in a SCY mission, we have listed in Table 1 the ELOs to be produced by a student in the ‘Design a CO2-friendly house'-mission.
Table 1. List of ELOs in Mission: Design a CO2-friendly house
|
| Type of activity | ELO |
| 1 | Identify goal states | Planning |
| 2 | Identify learning goals | Reflection on learning goals 1 |
| 3 | Build a model | Concept map on CO2 emissions |
| 4 | Give and classify examples | First ideas of my design group |
| 5 | Identify relevant concepts, variables, principles and criteria | Research questions of my expert group |
| 6 | Generate hypotheses | Hypothesis of my expert group |
| 7 | Browse resources for specific information | Data from browsed information |
| 8 | Design an experimental procedure | Experimental procedure |
| 9 | Run experiment | 9a. Data from real experiment 9b. Data from the thermal simulation 9c. Data from the energy consumption simulation 9d. Data from the converter |
| 10 | Organize data | Processed data from expert group |
| 11 | Interpret data | Conclusion of expert experiments |
| 12 | Summarize | Expert concept map |
| 13 | Explain | Expert presentation |
| 14 | Design a virtual artifact | Inventory of expert solutions |
| 15 | Design a virtual artifact | House choices |
| 16 | Build a virtual artifact | House drawings |
| 17 | Run experiment | 17a. House data from the thermal simulation 17b. House data from the energy consumption simulation 17c. House data from the converter |
| 18 | Organize data | Processed data from design group |
| 19 | Propose a decision | Presentation of house design |
| 20 | Explain | Individual report |
| 21 | Identify differences between current knowledge and learning goals | Reflection on learning goals 2 |
SCY-Lab learning environment
User experience
The SCY-Lab digital learning environment provides the look and feel of a computer desktop. Using SCY-Lab, the student can navigate through a mission, open assignments, browse through previously made ELOs, use tools (see Table 2) to make new ELOs, communicate with fellow students and customize his workspace.
Table 2. SCY-Lab tools
|
| Tool | Description |
| 1 | SCY-Interview | The SCY-Interview tool helps learners to design a good interview. |
| 2 | SCY-Feedback | SCY-Feedback is a peer assessment tool with which students can easily ask for and provide feedback on ELOs as they are being developed in a Mission. |
| 3 | SCY-Data | The data processing tool enables students to process and visualize numerical data sets. |
| 4 | SCY- Experimental Design | This tool allows learners to write down experimental procedure as task trees. |
| 5 | SCY-Lighter | The SCY-Lighter is a Mozilla Firefox Add-on for collecting relevant information on the web and saving it into the SCY-Lab. |
| 6 | SCY-Mapper | SCY-Mapper makes concept-maps representing ideas as nodes and the relationship between these ideas as links. |
| 7 | SCY-ePortfolio | The SCY-ePortfolio tool is used to build a mission portfolio (i.e., a collection of obligatory ELOs) to be assessed by the teacher. |
| 8 | SCYAssessment | SCYAssessment is a tool with which teachers assess submitted Portfolios (summative assessment). |
| 9 | SCY-Text | This is a simple text editor integrated into SCY-Lab. |
| 10 | SCY-Uploader | SCY-Uploader enables students to import external files into SCY-Lab as ELOS (e.g. word documents). |
| 11 | SCY-Dynamics | SCY-Dynamics is a modeling tool that helps create and simulate graph-based models of complex problems and phenomena. |
| 12 | SCY-Tagging | SCY-Tagging is a co-operative tagging tool used by students to tag ELOs in SCY-Lab. |
| 13 | SCY-Chat | The SCY chat tool allows learners to communicate with each other in SCY-Lab and thereby collaborate on ELOs. |
| 14 | SCY-Search | SCYSearch is a tool that enables students to search the collection of ELOs in RoOLO to find relevant work by themselves or by other learners. |
| 15 | SCY-Draw | SCYDraw tool allows learners to create simple drawings, with elementary drawing capabilities: shapes, freehand drawings, importing images. |
| 16 | SCY-Simulator | The SCYSimulator is a multi-purpose simulation tool that is able to show and run simulations created in the SimQuest authoring tool.
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| 17 | SCY-Datacollector and SCY-Formauthor | The mobile data collecting tool is a means for learners to collect numerical and multimedia data in the field with their mobile devices (based on the Android platform) and store the collections as ELOs in RoOLO.
The form authoring tool is fully integrated into SCY-Lab and can be used to create forms for data collecting activities. It can produce and create ELOs as well as log user actions. The user can use it as a tool for creating form templates as well as a tool to review the filled forms, i.e., work with the collected data. |
| 18 | Teacher tool: SCY-Authoring | SCY-Author is a tool that offers the teacher the ability to fine-tune a mission and obtain a real-time overview of activity in SCY-Lab. |
Note: For more details about the tools, please check the Part B of this manual (section 8).
Behind the scenes: monitoring student behavior and adapting the environment
What happens behind the scenes in SCY-Lab is what makes the learning environment truly innovative. First, whenever students use SCY-Lab, the system monitors their learning behavior. Student actions and other parameters that could convey important information are logged and processed. For example, SCY-Lab keeps track of the time spent in assignments and helps the teacher assess the quality of produced ELOs, but it is also able to analyze written text.
In the SCY project, these system actions that support the learning process as a result of student behavior are called scaffolds. In SCY-Lab, the teacher has the opportunity to adapt the scaffolding settings of the system to a specific classroom situation or educational strategy. One might, for instance, want SCY-Lab to provide maximum scaffolding in case students have never worked independently before.