Hi Brian! Thank you for watching our video. That is a great question. We are currently thinking about "sustained/sustainability" along two dimensions: One dimension is around engaging students and teachers in sustained modeling investigations. We see our focus on integrating data and modeling as one way to support extended modeling investigations in science class. We are also designing multiple units that conceptually build on each other for students to see their work as a long-term engagement in modeling. This is part of our research emphasis as well - to understand how to design for and support sustained investigations with modeling. The second dimension is around "sustainability" and designing for teachers to be able to use this beyond the duration of our project. We have been working very closely with our teacher partners on co-design for nearly 2 years now so their voices and expertise is "baked into" MoDa and our curricula. The vision is that this will help teachers make the materials their own and continue to use them beyond.

Hope this answers your question! 

Yes, this is very interesting and hopeful.  I am always interested in teachers talking to each other, and so, with respect to the project putting down lasting roots, I am wondering if there are channels or settings in which your teacher-collaborators can report to their colleagues and get them interested/excited about joining in -- and getting administration to do the same? 

This is something we're definitely interested in doing! Though we haven't yet figured out a way to do it. When our teacher-collaborators joined the project, Covid fatigue was a concern for many of them and they hesitated from even asking other teachers to join. Have you seen successful models of this in the last couple of years? We'd love to learn more if you have ideas ..  

Hi Billy!

Thank you for checking out the A2S project. About the co-design work with teachers: we have been meeting monthly with our 7 teacher partners since the project began nearly 2 years ago. We spend our monthly meetings sharing design drafts and getting feedback from the teachers. We also ran a Summer & Winter Teacher Institute in which we did more extensive design work with our partners. In our second year of the project, as teachers began implementing the units, we also used our meeting time as a space for teachers to share and reflect on how they adapted the units to their classrooms and what they found.

As a group, we are in CA, MA and NY. The decision to work with teachers in California was based on logistical reasons, more than anything else. It's been working out well because some of our team members are in California. The monthly meetings are all virtual so we do all see each other regularly. Some of us fly out to the west coast for longer PD sessions and classroom implementations. So overall, it's been working out well.

Hope this answers your question!

Hi Beatriz,

Those are both great questions! I'll answer the question about challenges with MoDa identified by teachers. When implementing the very first unit, we had one class of students at one school get so excited with coding that they kind of lost sight of disciplinary meaning making and that they were trying to model a phenomenon through the code. In this classroom, the teacher had students draw out a model (using code blocks from MoDa) before going back to the environment on the following day. That helped students reorient to the task at hand, and what the purpose of modeling is. In another school, many of the students had never programmed before and found the task a bit overwhelming. In this school, the teacher had the students build "cardstock" models using code blocks from the environment printed on sheets of paper. So the students first constructed a program using paper blocks, and then reconstructed that model in MoDa to run it. We think it's interesting that in both instances, the teachers identified ways to ground modeling with MoDa in physical materials to support students.

Thank you Victor! It's never too late: https://admin.a2s.fablevision-dev.com/ :)

Thanks!!!

Nice, Victor! Do try it!

Hi Shari! Thanks for watching our video and asking this question!

The units in our project include both qualitative and quantitative validation of models. For each unit, we select a different source of real-world data about a phenomenon. Sometimes that’s students’ videos of an experiment, sometimes publicly available data like satellite images. We’re even working on a unit where students will use a microcontroller and sensors to collect data.

In regards to the actual validation metrics students use, part of our curricular sequence includes discussions about what would be good ways to use the data we have to validate the models. For example, in the wildfire smoke spread unit, we watch satellite videos of smoke spread from a wildfire at different times with different environmental conditions, and we ask students how we can describe what we’re seeing in ways that will be useful for comparing with the model. For that unit, we often end up talking about the shape and the path of the smoke we see coming off the fire. To offer a quantitative example, in the ink spread unit, we talk with students about how to estimate how much the ink has spread in a beaker and then come up with a method to estimate the ink spread percentage based on videos they take of the experiment.

Hi Christine! Your work sounds really cool, and very closely related to what we're trying to do. We are looking to expand out to including other types of data (including large data sets through a tool like CODAP). I'd love to connect and learn about your work. Here's my email: awagh@mit.edu. Or, if you share ours, I'm happy to reach out!