#1098: Students’ Journeys with Boundary Tools: Comparing Home and Classroom Encounters with a Lab Experiment

Science learning is often confined to culturally scripted spaces such as classrooms, laboratories, and museums, each carrying expectations for how inquiry should unfold. This paper examines what happens when a science tool is intentionally designed to move across those spaces as a boundary tool. “Lab-on-a-Book” is a low-cost, portable kit embedded in a journal format for conducting chemical experiments. We analyze two enactments of the same cyanotype activity (one by an individual student at home and another in a secondary classroom) to explore how learners orient toward experimentation (how they question, hesitate, proceed, or seek validation). Findings show how the tool’s material and cultural design enable distinct forms of inquiry and reflection across contexts, positioning portability as a design strategy for expanding where and how science learning can occur.