Open peer commentary on the article “Elementary Students’ Construction of Geometric Transformation Reasoning in a Dynamic Animation Environment” by Alan Maloney. Upshot: Parnorkou and Maloney’s article presents an interesting, well-structured and clearly described study of children’s reasoning about mental rotations. Specifically, Parnorkou and Maloney deploy the microworld Graphs ’n Glyphs, and use it as a “window on thinking-in-change” as they observe and interview children who use it. Reading the article raised a few questions for me about the role of body syntonicity in learning about rotation of geometric shapes, and I wonder where (or if) the authors feel these foundational concepts fit in with their research.

Open peer commentary on the article “Circularity and the Micro-Macro-Difference” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: Füllsack provides a convincing argument for viewing circularity through a systems sciences perspective and for seeing micro-level emergence as an explanatory lens for phenomena that are circular at the macro-level. However, as an educator focusing on reasoning about circular macro-level phenomena through explanations at the micro-level, I see a series of issues relating designing appropriate learning experiences and fundamentally defining what this kind of thinking looks like.

Open peer commentary on the article “Plasticity, Granularity and Multiple Contingency - Essentials for Conceiving an Artificial Constructivist Agent” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: Füllsack presents the thought-provoking concept of a minimally artificial constructivist agent - the MACA. The MACA, unlike most agents, is not pre-programmed to respond to the world but is rather programmed to emergently develop predispositions through the evolution of an Artificial Neural Net. Füllsack posits three criteria for the MACA, including a minimum level of plasticity. Contrasting the models presented in the article with some of my own work, I raise two questions, particular to multi-level agent-based modeling, about how to interpret Füllsack’s concept of minimal level of plasticity.

Open peer commentary on the article “Maker Education: Where Is the Knowledge Construction?” by José Armando Valente & Paulo Blikstein. Abstract: Valente and Blikstein raise what I believe is an important criticism of the under-specification of learning in makerspaces and in the maker movement in general. Based on a synthesis of Piaget, Vygotsky and Papert, they suggest that an important part of the answer is to emphasize the role of teachers in the learning process. I fundamentally agree with their propositions, but raise three questions about the resulting challenges to teacher training and professional development.

Open peer commentary on the article “Creativity in Solving Short Tasks for Learning Computational Thinking” by Valentina Dagienė, Gerald Futschek & Gabrielė Stupurienė. Abstract: The target article presents an interesting addition to microlearning tasks by introducing a physically manipulable representation of computing problems, allowing students to engage in constructionist learning. While I applaud the authors’ approach, and while I find their overall argument compelling, I still see some tensions in their design work, both as it relates to the connection to constructionism in general, and as a starting point for computing education in the long term. In this commentary I challenge the authors to elaborate on these critical aspects of their work, and on how it might affect their future design work.

In spite of decades of use of agent-based modelling in social policy research and in educational contexts, very little work has been done on combining the two. This paper accounts for a proof-of-concept single case-study conducted in a college-level Social Policy course, using agent-based modelling to teach students about the social and human aspects of urban planning and regional development. The study finds that an agent-based model helped a group of students think through a social policy design decision by acting as an object-to-think-with, and helped students better connect social policy outcomes with behaviours at the level of individual citizens. The study also suggests a set of new issues facing the design of Constructionist activities or environments for the social sciences.

Key words: agent-based modelling, NetLogo, social policy education, constructionism.

Abstract: Designing, implementing and assessing the effects of classroom-based learning experiences spans across a wide variety of methodological, epistemological and design-related issues. Additionally, the use of data mining and computational methods for supporting qualitative data analyses is still new to the field. Potentially because of this, we received ten good, but quite different commentary questions, which we have organized under five headings. In this response, we address each of them to provide a more thorough background or reasoning behind the decisions we made in our target article.

Context: Conceptual developments in our understanding of knowledge are merging with machine-learning methods for making sense of data. This creates new, and interesting ways in which we can document and analyse knowledge, and conceptual change. Problem: Currently, the study of conceptual change is often limited to small sample sizes because of the laborious nature of existing, purely qualitative approaches. Method: We present Association Rule Mining to better measure and understand changes in students’ thinking at the classroom level, based on data collected while implementing a constructionist learning activity in a US college classroom. Association Rule Mining is used on a set of qualitatively coded student responses. We then look at changes in the association rules between students’ responses before and after a learning activity to better understand students’ conceptual change at the classroom level. Results: We find that students converge on a more complete and accurate set of causal claims in their post-responses. Finding these changes would have been difficult or impossible without Association Rule Mining, or a similar approach. This suggests that Association Rule Mining is a potentially fruitful approach to analysing conceptual change at the classroom level. Implications: Adding Association Rule Mining to the arsenal of computational qualitative methods will let us study student data of larger sizes than previously. Constructivist content: Association Rule Mining is agnostic with regard to the ontology of its data. This makes Association Rule Mining a particularly suitable analysis method when taking a constructivist view of learning

Key words: Qualitative research, computational methods, knowledge analysis, education, conceptual change, complex systems thinking, learning sciences, constructionism.