#436: Designing an Embodied Learning Environment for Children’s Body-Based Sense-Making

This paper outlines the design and implementation of an embodied circulatory system activity in which children in grades 3-5 created wearable, light-up blood cells and enacted the roles of blood cells, parts of the heart, and lungs. Drawing on video data, we characterized and coded two types of student-generated gestures, focusing on their role in supporting both embodied modeling and making connections to everyday experiences. These emergent embodied actions provided a window into transitional thinking and revealed how learners made sense of unfamiliar science concepts using gestures. This highlights the importance of attending to gestures produced during learning moments as powerful indicators and resources for sense-making in embodied learning environments and offers implications for both the design of learning environments and science education research.