Enacting Science Inqury Scripts across Contexts and in Hybrid Spaces

We have found ourselves struggling with the design of digital technology to support scripted collaboration in science education. There are two emergent trends that challenge current understanding of collaborative scripts: One is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. The other is the merging of embodied experiences from science centres and museums with the activities in the science classroom to produce fun, engaging, and reflective experiences. Further, these environments are inherently social, facilitating dialogue and social exchange. For design of collaborative science learning these trends are challenging, as a network of scripts typically is needed, addressing collaboration, the inquiry process, the epistemological interactions, and the flow of materials that is being consumed and produced. These scripts are inscribed into a range of technologies, such as web-based environments, mobile applications, tangible and physical interfaces, social networks, and spatial, embedded and embodied simulations in immersive learning environments as found in science centres. In this paper we look into a design based research intervention that took place in a Secondary Norwegian school and at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Based on our experiences we identify a need for new concepts that can increase the awareness in design to the role of scripts in complex environments, and suggest a socio-material and material-semiotic approach that emphasize how scripts are inscribed and entangled in the social and in the material resources, and how they are enacted in epistemological and social activities by students, teachers, and museum educators.