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Research about modeling emphasizes the importance of heterogeneity in science learning. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship seeks curricular pathways for epistemic and representational convergence. In response to this tension, we propose two constructs: heterogeneity-seeking curricula and commitments. Heterogeneity-seeking curricula emphasize generating and valuing multiple representations of phenomena, offering an image of science that foregrounds messy, nonlinear aspects of learning. Commitments parallel epistemic cognition research by focusing on values that shape students' modeling; however, rather than looking for disciplinary practices in students' modeling, commitments take students' values as a starting point, mapping them to disciplinary resources not typically foregrounded in science education. Using a lens of commitments, we analyze six implementations of a heterogeneity-seeking 6th grade modeling curriculum, and we compare the lens of commitments to the lens of epistemic ideals. Then, we show that, in this context, commitments functioned like epistemic ideals by acting as evaluative resources during modeling. However, commitments also extended beyond this role by helping students ask and explore questions that were not anticipated by the curriculum, problematizing a view of phenomena as objective and external to students' modeling work and showing them instead to be a production of the classroom's multidimensional modeling discourse.

In this paper, we emphasize the importance of looking beyond technology itself and including interactional and experiential elements in our research gaze in informal computing education in science museums. We argue that, in these contexts, facilitation can be understood as "design work" that is both complex and challenging. We identify how focusing on "infrastructuring"--the process by which an exhibit's support systems emerge, shift, and are sustained in practice--can help develop a richer understanding of the complexity of this work. In this study, we examine facilitators' experiences of facilitating and supporting a computational exhibit in a science museum. We identify how facilitators' expertise, roles, and responsibilities shape their facilitation work. Through analysis of video-recorded interactions at the exhibit and interviews with facilitators, we showcase how facilitators' in-the-moment design moves addressed breakdowns of the exhibit's infrastructure. These design moves emerged from the complex interaction of each facilitator's epistemological views of computing and museum education, values, past experiences, and disciplinary background, as well as the museum culture and other institutional constraints. This analysis represents an important challenge to technocentric stances in informal computing education with implications for informal educators and managers, as well as designers and design researchers more broadly.

Background: We outline a case for how the Learning Sciences is at a powerful inflection point where the "real world" needs to be seen as comprised of the political entities and processes in which learning happens. We seek to sharpen the principle that learning is political by elucidating historical and contemporary processes of European and U.S. imperialism that remain foundational to our field and by developing the argument that theories of learning are theories of society. Methods: Through a contrapuntal approach, which emphasizes a critical lens to analyze empire, we juxtapose notions of authentic practice in computing education with scholarship in sociology that brings the lives of tech industry immigrant workers to the fore. Findings: Our analysis reveals how the social construction of disciplinary and professional expertise in computing is intricately interwoven with historically persistent patterns of the appropriation of the lives and labor of "endarkened" people through systems of transnational migration and institutional forms of racial segregation. Contribution: A contrapuntal lens in the Learning Sciences prompts our field to embrace the necessary uncertainties and the theoretical and methodological possibilities that emerge when sites of learning and learning itself are recognized as political and as contestations of empire.

We have iteratively designed and researched five digital games focusing on Newtonian dynamics for middle school classrooms during the past seven years. The designs have evolved dramatically in terms of the roles and relationships of the formal representations, phenomenological representations, and control schemes. Phenomenological representations can be thought of as the "world" representations that depict the actual actions and motion of a game as they occur (i.e., the central representations in most recreational games). Formal representations highlight the disciplinary relationships of interest from a pedagogical perspective (such as vector arrows, graphs, and dot traces). Our initial design perspective focused on highlighting the formal physics relationships within popular game-play mechanics. This perspective prioritized a commitment to the phenomenological representations and controls of recreational games, specifically marble-genre games. We designed formal representations around and over the phenomenological representations of that genre. Over the next seven years, we navigated the tensions between the original recreational genre and creating a new genre situated within the formal representations themselves. More specifically, our designs evolved to situate the game-play squarely in the formal representations in terms of the controls as well as in terms of the communication of goals and challenges. We backgrounded phenomenological representations and streamlined visual complexity to focus on key relationships. Our discussion compares our design evolution to the "SimCalc" design evolution recounted in IJDL's recent special issue on historic design cases.

In recent years, the field of education has challenged researchers and practitioners to incorporate computing as an essential focus of K-12 STEM education. Integrating computing within K-12 STEM supports learners of all ages in codeveloping and using computational thinking in existing curricular contexts alongside practices essential for developing mathematical and scientific expertise. In this paper, we present findings from a design-based, microgenetic study in which an agent-based programming and computational modeling platform--ViMAP--was integrated with existing elementary science and math curricula through lessons co-designed and taught by the classroom teacher across a period of seven months. We present a dialogical re-positioning of coding, where disciplinarily grounded meanings of code emerge through the construction of computational utterances--i.e., computer models as well as complementary conversations and physical models that serve as mathematical and scientific explanations--through the use of socio-mathematical norms.

This paper situates a critical review of studies that we have conducted within the broader research literature to analyze the affordances of integrating modeling within disciplinarily-integrated games from computational thinking and science as practice perspectives. Across the studies, the analyses pursue two themes: (a) the role of agent-based modeling as a synergistic local practice around which we can integrate computational thinking and scientific modeling within digital games and (b) the role of collaboration in leveraging those synergies. We then present a design of a disciplinarily-integrated game that integrates these themes to demonstrate one such possible instantiation of the themes. Finally, we discuss the implications for design and praxis with a particular focus on learning in classrooms across the curriculum. Specifically, we first explore the implications in terms of connecting to teachers' views of practice by framing computational modeling and computational thinking as mathematization. We then explore the implications of shifting from a focus on single players to communities of practice in terms of computational participation as science as practice. We close by exploring the pragmatic and pedagogical affordances of shifting from stand-alone single-topic games to flexible agent-based environments in terms of student development across the curriculum.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualise learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emergent dimensions: their geospatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalised forces -- overtly and implicitly -- shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and conceptualisations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse.

Studies of scientific practice demonstrate that the development of scientific models is an enactive and emergent process (e.g., Pickering 1995; Chandrasekharan and Nersessian 2017). Scientists make meaning through processes such as perspective taking, finding patterns, and following intuitions. In this paper, we focus on how a group of fourth grade learners and their teacher engaged in interpretation in ways that align with core ideas and practices in kinematics and computing. Cycles of measuring and modeling--including computer programming--helped to support classroom interactions that highlighted the interpretive nature of modeling and participation in model construction as a knowledge-building process. We draw on literature from the history and philosophy of science in order to analyze the students' interpretive actions as forms of epistemic and representational agency, constituting a construct we term "disciplined interpretation." We demonstrate how students' disciplined interpretative moves help to position them as owners of their own design decisions and their rights to interpret the phenomena they were modeling, data collected from those phenomena, and the scientific and computational models themselves. We present four extended episodes that characterize the nature of activity in the classroom and the development of students' disciplined interpretations in terms of learning to recognize scientific patterns amid complex perceptual fields, and to represent them in ways that support sensemaking.

In this article, we argue that when complex sociopolitical issues such as ethnocentrism and racial segregation are represented as complex, emergent systems using agent-based computational models (in short agent-based models or ABMs), discourse about these representations can disrupt social studies teacher candidates' dispositions of teaching social studies without engaging in critical conversations about race and power. Our study extends the literature on agent-based computing to the domain of social studies education, and demonstrates how preservice teachers' participation in agent-based modeling activities can help them adopt a more critical stance toward designing learning activities for their future classrooms.

Digital games can make unique and powerful contributions to K-12 science education, but much of that potential remains unrealized. Research evaluating games for learning still relies primarily on pre- and post-test data, which limits possible insights into more complex interactions between game design features, gameplay, and formal assessment. Therefore, a critical step forward involves developing rich representations for analyzing gameplay data. This paper leverages data mining techniques to model learning and performance, using a metadata markup language that relates game actions to concepts relevant to specific game contexts. We discuss results from a classroom study and identify potential relationships between students' planning/prediction behaviors observed across game levels and improvement on formal assessments. The results have implications for scaffolding specific activities, that include physics learning during gameplay, solution planning and effect prediction. Overall, the approach underscores the value of our contextualized approach to gameplay markup to facilitate data mining and discovery.

In this paper, we present a third-grade ecology learning environment that integrates two forms of modeling--embodied modeling and agent-based modeling (ABMs)--through the generation of mathematical representations that are common to both forms of modeling. The term "agent" in the context of ABMs indicates individual computational objects or actors that obey simple rules assigned or controlled by the user. It is the interactions between these agents that give rise to emergent, aggregate-level behaviors in complex systems. While several researchers have argued for the effectiveness of ABMs for learning about complex systems, the design of classroom activity systems using ABMs, especially for elementary students, has received relatively less attention. In this paper, we report on a 2-week long proof-of-concept study conducted in a third-grade classroom of 15 students in which students began with an embodied modeling activity of foraging behavior, followed with the generation of mathematical inscriptions based on their embodied actions, and finally, conducted further inquiry of interdependence in an ecosystem using two separate ABMs. Furthermore, we show that the lens of mechanistic reasoning can be productively used to identify the process of students' conceptual development of interdependence in an ecosystem as they engage in the modeling activities.

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the "aesthetics" of children's experience. In "Democracy and Education," Dewey links "democracy" with a distinctive understanding of "experience." For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in "the unity or integrity of experience." In "Art as Experience," Dewey presents "aesthetic" experience as the "fundamental" form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences and that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially "aesthetic" in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race.

Students from middle school to college have difficulties in interpreting and understanding complex systems such as ecological phenomena. Researchers have suggested that students experience difficulties in reconciling the relationships between individuals, populations, and species, as well as the interactions between organisms and their environment in the ecosystem. Multi-agent-based computational models (MABMs) can explicitly capture agents and their interactions by representing individual actors as computational objects with assigned rules. As a result, the collective aggregate-level behavior of the population dynamically emerges from simulations that generate the aggregation of these interactions. Past studies have used a variety of scaffolds to help students learn ecological phenomena. Yet, there is no theoretical framework that supports the systematic design of scaffolds to aid students' learning in MABMs. Our paper addresses this issue by proposing a comprehensive framework for the design, analysis, and evaluation of scaffolding to support students' learning of ecology in a MABM. We present a study in which middle school students used a MABM to investigate and learn about a desert ecosystem. We identify the different types of scaffolds needed to support inquiry learning activities in this simulation environment and use our theoretical framework to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scaffolds in helping students develop a deep understanding of the complex ecological behaviors represented in the simulation..

Environments in which learning involves coordinating multiple external representations (MERs) can productively support learners in making sense of complex models and relationships. Educational digital games provide an increasing popular medium for engaging students in manipulating and exploring such models and relationships. This article applies cognitive science research on MERs to a range of popular educational and recreational games that focus on the interpretation and manipulation of models. We leverage the literatures on embodied cognition, adaptive scaffolding, science education, and dynamic visualizations to address the challenges, trade-offs, and questions highlighted by the research. We apply these research-derived design considerations to analyze (a) the extent and forms through which the design considerations are reflected in the design of the games, (b) the implications for designing effective model-based games for learning, and (c) the implications for future research on MERs.

How does deep conceptual change occur when students play well-designed educational games? To answer this question, we present a case study in the form of a microgenetic analysis of a student's processes of knowledge construction as he played a conceptually-integrated digital game (SURGE Next) designed to support learning about Newtonian mechanics. Grounded in the Knowledge In Pieces framework of conceptual change (A. diSessa, 1993), we analyze the processes through which the student, Jamal, developed an expert-like understanding of deflections, a phenomenon that has been previously identified as challenging to understand for novice physics learners. We also explore the key characteristics of SURGE Next supporting these conceptual change processes. Our analysis shows that Jamal's learning involved iterative refinement of his conceptual understanding through distributed encoding (A. diSessa, 1993). That is, as Jamal advanced through the game levels in SURGE Next, he developed a progressively more distributed sense of mechanism (A. diSessa, 1993) and was able to identify and operationalize the roles of the direction and magnitude of an object's initial (or previous) velocity in determining the velocity resulting from the application of a new impulse. We also discuss the methodological and design implications of our findings for future research on digital games for learning. [An earlier version of this article was presented at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching Conference, 2013.]

Background: In this paper, we investigate the relationship between theory and design in the context of creating digital games to support children's development of scientific expertise. Synthesis: Theoretically, we consider two frameworks--Knowledge in Pieces (or KiP) and Science as Practice (or SaP). While KiP is a theory about the structure of human knowledge, SaP is a theoretical perspective about the development of scientific expertise that emphasizes the deeply intertwined nature of conceptual development and the development of epistemic and representational practices. We then synthesize research on modeling and games from our research group and others to create a composite argument and theoretical framing for the importance of "disciplinary integration" in the design of digital games for science learning. Conclusions: We show how shifting from KiP to SaP as the underlying theoretical anchor in our designs results in shifting from focusing on "conceptual integration" to focusing on "disciplinary integration." We first present our initial framing and design around conceptual integration. We then trace the evolution and rationale for disciplinary integration across our development and research on four game platforms. Finally, we discuss the implications and generalizability of disciplinary integration across the design of digital games for science learning.

In this paper, we investigate how elementary school students develop multi-level explanations of population dynamics in a simple predator-prey ecosystem, through scaffolded interactions with a multi-agent-based computational model (MABM). The term "agent" in an MABM indicates individual computational objects or actors (e.g., cars), and these agents obey simple rules assigned or manipulated by the user (e.g., speeding up, slowing down, etc.). It is the interactions between these agents, based on the rules assigned by the user, that give rise to "emergent", aggregate-level behavior (e.g., formation and movement of the traffic jam). Natural selection is such an emergent phenomenon, which has been shown to be challenging for novices (K16 students) to understand. Whereas prior research on learning evolutionary phenomena with MABMs has typically focused on high school students and beyond, we investigate how elementary students (4th graders) develop multi-level explanations of some introductory aspects of natural selection--species differentiation and population change--through scaffolded interactions with an MABM that simulates predator-prey dynamics in a simple birds-butterflies ecosystem. We conducted a semi-clinical interview based study with ten participants, in which we focused on the following: a) identifying the nature of learners' initial interpretations of salient events or elements of the represented phenomena, b) identifying the roles these interpretations play in the development of their multi-level explanations, and c) how attending to different levels of the relevant phenomena can make explicit different mechanisms to the learners. In addition, our analysis also shows that although there were differences between high- and low-performing students (in terms of being able to explain population-level behaviors) in the pre-test, these differences disappeared in the post-test.

Novice learners find motion as a continuous process of change challenging to understand. In this paper, we present a pedagogical approach based on agent-based, visual programming to address this issue. Integrating agent-based programming, in particular, Logo programming, with curricular science has been shown to be challenging in previous research on educational computing. We present a new Logo-based visual programming language--ViMAP--and, a sequence of learning activities involving programming and modeling, designed specifically to support seamless integration between programming and learning kinematics. We describe relevant affordances of the ViMAP environment that supports such seamless integration. We then present ViMAP-MoMo, a curricular unit designed in ViMAP for modeling kinematics, for a wide range of students (elementary-high school). Finally, we describe in detail a sequence of learning activities in three phases, discuss the underlying rationale for each phase, and where relevant, report results in the form of observational data from two studies.

Electricity is regarded as one of the most challenging topics for students of all ages. Several researchers have suggested that naive misconceptions about electricity stem from a deep incommensurability (Slotta and Chi 2006; Chi 2005) or incompatibility (Chi et al. 1994) between naive and expert knowledge structures. In this paper we argue that adopting an emergent levels-based perspective as proposed by Wilensky and Resnick (1999), allows us to reconceive commonly noted misconceptions in electricity as behavioral evidences of "slippage between levels," i.e., these misconceptions appear when otherwise productive knowledge elements are sometimes activated inappropriately due to certain macro-level phenomenological cues only. We then introduce NIELS (NetLogo Investigations In Electromagnetism), a curriculum of emergent multi-agent-based computational models. NIELS models represent phenomena such as electric current and resistance as "emergent" from simple, body-syntonic interactions between electrons and other charges in a circuit. We discuss results from a pilot implementation of NIELS in an undergraduate physics course, that highlight the ability of an emergent levels-based approach to provide students with a deep, expert-like understanding of the relevant phenomena by "bootstrapping," rather than "discarding" their existing repertoire of intuitive knowledge.

In this paper, we emphasize the importance of looking beyond technology itself and including interactional and experiential elements in our research gaze in informal computing education in science museums. We argue that, in these contexts, facilitation can be understood as design work that is both complex and challenging. We identify how focusing on infrastructuring—the process by which an exhibit's support systems emerge, shift, and are sustained in practice—can help develop a richer understanding of the complexity of this work. In this study, we examine facilitators' experiences of facilitating and supporting a computational exhibit in a science museum. We identify how facilitators' expertise, roles, and responsibilities shape their facilitation work. Through analysis of video-recorded interactions at the exhibit and interviews with facilitators, we showcase how facilitators' in-the-moment design moves addressed breakdowns of the exhibit's infrastructure. These design moves emerged from the complex interaction of each facilitator's epistemological views of computing and museum education, values, past experiences, and disciplinary background, as well as the museum culture and other institutional constraints. This analysis represents an important challenge to technocentric stances in informal computing education with implications for informal educators and managers, as well as designers and design researchers more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about modeling emphasizes the importance of heterogeneity in science learning. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship seeks curricular pathways for epistemic and representational convergence. In response to this tension, we propose two constructs: heterogeneity-seeking curricula and commitments. Heterogeneity-seeking curricula emphasize generating and valuing multiple representations of phenomena, offering an image of science that foregrounds messy, nonlinear aspects of learning. Commitments parallel epistemic cognition research by focusing on values that shape students' modeling; however, rather than looking for disciplinary practices in students' modeling, commitments take students' values as a starting point, mapping them to disciplinary resources not typically foregrounded in science education. Using a lens of commitments, we analyze six implementations of a heterogeneity-seeking 6th grade modeling curriculum, and we compare the lens of commitments to the lens of epistemic ideals. Then, we show that, in this context, commitments functioned like epistemic ideals by acting as evaluative resources during modeling. However, commitments also extended beyond this role by helping students ask and explore questions that were not anticipated by the curriculum, problematizing a view of phenomena as objective and external to students' modeling work and showing them instead to be a production of the classroom's multidimensional modeling discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for innovation in medical device technology is immense; especially to replace dialysis techniques the necessity is extremely high. Available techniques that promised to replace dialysis have not yet geared up to the marketization level. The utilization of live kidney cells makes these devices costly, delicate, and unreliable. This paper aims to design a bioreactor to mimic the reabsorption function of the kidney that is fully artificial and highly controllable, which can be one step forward to the emerging Kidney-on-Chip (KOC) technology. The additional benefit of the proposed design is that it utilizes size-dependent reabsorption along with charge-dependent reabsorption phenomena to make it more compatible with human kidney function. The electrophoresis (EP), and di-electrophoresis (DEP) techniques are utilized to mimic the reabsorption function in this report. The structure utilized in the present design exactly replicates the proximal convoluted tubule (PCT) dimensions and functions as well. The whole setup is implemented in the COMSOL Multiphysics FEM benchmark tool for simulation, and analysis with appropriate boundary conditions. The device when excited by an electric field, Electrophoresis has produced a maximum velocity of 1.07 m/s for DC excitation and di-electrophoresis has produced a maximum flow velocity of 1.23 m/s, where both the offset voltages are the same (0.7 V). The flow velocity obtained utilizing both EP and DEP produced a reabsorption rate of 50-58% depending on the voltage applied and dimensions considered which is close to 60% reabsorption rate of the normal human kidney PCT. In accordance with the outcomes produced, the di-electrophoresis technique proved to be more efficient in realizing bioreactor as compared to electrophoresis. The novelty of the present work lies in the creation of a simulation environment, rigorous analysis, and optimization of the bioreactor supported by compact mathematical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review provides a detailed literature survey on microfluidics and its road map toward kidney-on-chip technology. The whole review has been tailored with a clear description of crucial milestones in regenerative medicine, such as bioengineering, tissue engineering, microfluidics, microfluidic applications in biomedical engineering, capabilities of microfluidics in biomimetics, organ-on-chip, kidney-on-chip for disease modeling, drug toxicity, and implantable devices. This paper also presents future scope for research in the bio-microfluidics domain and biomimetics domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We outline a case for how the Learning Sciences is at a powerful inflection point where the "real world" needs to be seen as comprised of the political entities and processes in which learning happens. We seek to sharpen the principle that learning is political by elucidating historical and contemporary processes of European and U.S. imperialism that remain foundational to our field and by developing the argument that theories of learning are theories of society. Through a contrapuntal approach, which emphasizes a critical lens to analyze empire, we juxtapose notions of authentic practice in computing education with scholarship in sociology that brings the lives of tech industry immigrant workers to the fore. Our analysis reveals how the social construction of disciplinary and professional expertise in computing is intricately interwoven with historically persistent patterns of the appropriation of the lives and labor of endarkened people through systems of transnational migration and institutional forms of racial segregation. A contrapuntal lens in the Learning Sciences prompts our field to embrace the necessary uncertainties and the theoretical and methodological possibilities that emerge when sites of learning and learning itself are recognized as political and as contestations of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualise learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emergent dimensions: their geospatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalised forces – overtly and implicitly – shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and conceptualisations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human kidneys tend to be affected adversely and fail to function more often than any other organ in the body because of diet, heredity, and lifestyle of a person. Dialysis is the technique presently in use for replacing the failed kidney function but it is packed with painfulness, bulkiness, and is costly also. There is a growing need for development of an artificial kidney that eradicates the problems associated with dialysis. This article proposes a structure that mimics the most important aspect of the human kidney: the size‐dependent reabsorption of endothelial cells in the proximal convoluted tubule (PCT). The proposed structure consists of transporting channels connecting blood tubules surrounded on both sides of a main tubule. Geometries of the channels are analyzed for optimum flow by varying angles with respect to the main tubule. The analytical formulae have been developed by considering proper boundary conditions governing the flow in the structure, which makes the model as robust, concise, and realistic as the actual PCT. The mathematical model is validated against the benchmark FEM tool COMSOL Multiphysics and the results seem to be satisfactory. This article concludes, that slant channels possess a considerably higher average flow velocity of 5.39 × 10–5 m/s (≈52% reabsorption rate) than straight channels with 4.77 × 10–5 m/s (≈46% reabsorption rate) which is closer to the actual PCT reabsorption rate of 60%. The proposed model is first of its kind in nature among the reported works which creates and exhibits simulation environment of PCT reabsorption function supported by mathematical formulation and also can be useful to study and develop artificial kidney in near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates a critical review of studies that we have conducted within the broader research literature to analyze the affordances of integrating modeling within disciplinarily-integrated games from computational thinking and science as practice perspectives. Across the studies, the analyses pursue two themes: (a) the role of agent-based modeling as a synergistic local practice around which we can integrate computational thinking and scientific modeling within digital games and (b) the role of collaboration in leveraging those synergies. We then present a design of a disciplinarily-integrated game that integrates these themes to demonstrate one such possible instantiation of the themes. Finally, we discuss the implications for design and praxis with a particular focus on learning in classrooms across the curriculum. Specifically, we first explore the implications in terms of connecting to teachers' views of practice by framing computational modeling and computational thinking as mathematization. We then explore the implications of shifting from a focus on single players to communities of practice in terms of computational participation as science as practice. We close by exploring the pragmatic and pedagogical affordances of shifting from stand-alone single-topic games to flexible agent-based environments in terms of student development across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hepatitis E is a common, mainly water-borne hepatotropic virus prevalent mainly in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. In the eastern part of India epidemics of acute hepatitis E are well reported. Hepatitis E commonly presents as self-limiting acute viral hepatitis among young adults, except for some critical clinical complications during pregnancy. In epidemiological research, subclinical acute hepatitis E infection is also reported from different parts of the world, including developed nations such as the USA (predominantly in the population aged >60 years). Though primarily hepatotropic, in the literature there are reports of rare extrahepatic manifestation of acute hepatitis E. Here we present an elderly lady with acute hepatitis E who primarily presented with acute myocarditis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a growing body of literature that argues for the use of computational programming and modelling in K-12 science classrooms. However, one of the common pedagogical challenges of using computational modelling in the classroom is the overhead of learning programming, which interrupts curricular flow because it requires specialized technical knowledge. In this article, our goal will be to illustrate a pathway for integrating computational modelling and programming in the science classroom for teachers with little or no background in programming. Drawing upon our findings from an ongoing series of designbased professional learning sessions with 56 teachers in K-12 public and charter schools in Alberta organized by the Galileo Educational Network, we will argue that (a) when teachers, with little or no background in programming, view programming as a way to "mathematize" the world, they can visualize and implement seamless integration of programming and modelling with their science curricula; and (b) the use of multiple and complementary forms of programming and modelling (eg, physical, virtual and embodied) can facilitate such integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]