An Embodied/Grounded Cognition Perspective on Educational Technology - New Science of Learning - page 50

Media Lab to have students in elementary and middle school program simple video
games to embody their understanding of something in the agents in those video
games. Scratch is a computer programming language that tries to teach program-
ming through video game construction. Initial results indicate that having students
act out agent actions using their own bodies (a real embodied experience) then pro-
gramming the virtual agents to do the same thing (a virtual embodied experience)
is a particularly effective learning approach. Other recent work is trying to do the
same thing by programming robots to move around in and interacting with the real
world (instead of a virtual world) to embody and test the student understanding (Li,
Kang, Lu, Han, & Black, 2009).
Conclusions
Recent basic cognitive research and theory in perceptually grounded or embodied
cognition provides a framework for considering how we can deepen and increase
student learning and understanding by having them develop a “feel” for what they
are learning in addition to knowing about it. Used in ways guided by this theoreti-
cal framework, video game playing together with more formal learning, interactive
graphic computer simulations involving movement and animation (and force feed-
back), video game programming and robot programming can be used to increase
student learning and understanding.
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