Berland, 2/9/2009, 4:30 PM Constructionist Collaborative Engineering 1 Constructionist Collaborative Engineering: PVBOT

This paper describes constructionist collaborative engineering (CCE), a paradigm for teaching high school students to understand science from a complex systems perspective. Constructionism, as originally developed by Papert (1980), is in part a theory of understanding how people learn more effectively by building, programming, creating, and designing their own materials for learning ("objects to think with"). CCE builds on this work by describing collaborative creation by students of solutions to engineering problems using complex systems methods. We present PVBOT (Physical/Virtual roBOTics) as a physical robotics CCE system in which students individually build and program simple physical robots that must work together to achieve a common goal. By doing so, the students come to understand the complex systems perspective of individual agents working in concert to create an "emergent" solution. We explore CCE as a paradigm for teaching the complex systems perspective and discuss the tradeoffs of using PVBOT to teach the complex systems perspective.