A Mobile Application with Embodied Multimodal Interactions for Understanding Representations of Motion in Physics

Current research in the Learning Sciences points out different methods and approaches to enhance and assist students in their learning and understanding of mathematical representations of the underlying physics of everyday situations. One of the aims of this paper is to address how mobile applications can be designed to support some of the pedagogical challenges associated with learners ́ understanding of different graphical representations of motion – e.g. displacement as a function of time, velocity as a function of time, and how these couple to the actual motion, to each other, as well as to other mathematical representations of motion such as functions, equations and descriptive text. A prototype design is presented including a new type of application, or app, for mobile and in classroom use, using touchand gesture based technology. One of the specific aims of this set of applications is to spur the learners exposure to, interaction with, as well as creation of multiple and multimodal representations of physical everyday phenomena involving motion, in a personal inquiry-based approach that could involve both informal as well as formal learning activities.