Open AccessInnovate to Mitigate: Learning as Activity in a Team of High School Students Addressing a Climate Mitigation Challenge
Author(s) -
Brian Drayton,
Gillian Puttick
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
sustainability in environment
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2470-6388
pISSN - 2470-637X
DOI - 10.22158/se.v3n1p1
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , metacognition , situated , science learning , team based learning , psychology , mathematics education , problem based learning , knowledge management , computer science , science education , medical education , ecology , cognition , medicine , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , biology
The Innovate to Mitigate project designed and conducted a competition for students aged 13-18 to propose and test strategies for mitigating rising levels of greenhouse gases. This paper explores the scientific inquiry and interdisciplinary learning of a 12th grade high school team over 6 months of participation. We used an activity-theoretic approach as a framework for capturing and analyzing the structure of the learning system in the team, situated within a science competition. This approach provided a lens both for finding and analyzing team learning at several levels—conceptual, procedural, metacognitive—and for revealing the processes by which learning was mediated by the activity system.