Implementing a culture of creative Inquiry with ipads in elementary science education

This paper is discussing first outcomes of an ongoing research (2012-2015) about creative inquiry-based learning with tablet-cloud systems in elementary science education. The study is investigating the situated ways in which 8 to 12 year old students make sense of science phenomena through creative inquiry practices enhanced by tablets and cloud systems.
Inquiry can be defined as an active creation of knowledge through the pursuit of open-ended questions, data gathering and related explanations from evidence.
Inquiry-based school activities constitute a learner-centred context for students to develop understanding of scientific concepts and basic inquiry abilities as for example posing and refining research questions, planning and managing an investigation or analysing and communicating results.
From early childhood onwards, children explore their environments and actively build knowledge through interest-driven inquiry. New media devices may support or even extend this inclination as they offer the potential to extend the domain and range of children’s inquiry. Especially, new tablet-computers include an array of features, which allow to capture, collect, treat and visualize a span of multimodal data related to science phenomena under exploration. Applications enable students to merge data from their own investigations with content they retrieve from digital sources. This student-generated content can be easily shared with teachers and other groups through the school-based cloud system or disseminated as final outcomes to a private or public audience.
The paper discusses the potential of tablet-computers to facilitate student-centred exploration of science phenomena and the formation of scientific thinking in school-based science activities. Evidence is based on different kind of data collected either by students on the internal school cloud (multimodal classroom productions, self-recordings about their inquiry approaches) or by researchers (video data from science lessons, video-stimulated recall interviews with students).
Outcomes of our analysis reveal that mobile devices create extended opportunities for skill development in science classrooms. We evidence an increase of self-directed, inquiry-oriented and interest-driven learning skills. The tablet-cloud systems stimulate student engagement and self-expression, i.e., explanations from self-collected evidence, evidence-based argumentation and justification of own approaches.