![]() The activity engages students in a solution process and not just memorizing mathematical formulas. This understanding complements what students achieve through existing curricula, making for richer mathematical understanding. Through both its user interface and the need to coordinate actions with other students, PANDA BEAR fosters a new understanding of standard geometric concepts. In that example, an equilateral triangle emerges as the optimal solution. Together, the students can then be led to collaborate in solving challenges such as maximizing the area while keeping the perimeter below a given value. As the students move their vertices around, they receive live updates on their individual client interfaces of the polygon's perimeter and area. In this activity, affectionately called Perimeters and Areas by Embodied Agent Reasoning, or "PANDA BEAR", each student controls a single vertex of a shared polygon. No prior knowledge in electricity or programming in required. Using these models, students as young as 5-th graders can actively explore and modify with the relevant phenomena by interacting with the models at various levels - e.g., running glass-box experiments by changing values of variables on the GUI and observing the resultant phenomena, and/or, by modifying and extending the underlying NetLogo program. Models in NIELS depict phenomena aggregate-level phenomena such as current, voltage and resistance as emergent - i.e., they arise due to simple interactions between many individual-level "objects" such as atoms and electrons. ![]() Learning Scientists suggest that this is due to the fact that we do not have access to electrical phenomena at a microscopic level - i.e., at the level of atoms and electrons. Most students find electricity a particularly hard topic to learn, whereas, most of them find electrostatics is relatively much easier. NIELS is a curricular unit consisting of a sequence of simulations authored in the NetLogo modelling environment.
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