We examine expert human mathematics-tutor gestures in the context of an interactive design for proportionality in order to design a virtual pedagogical agent. Early results implicate distinct gesture morphologies serving consistent contextual functionalities in guiding learners towards quantitative descriptions of proportional relations.

Little is known about the collaborative learning processes of interdisciplinary teams designing technology-enabled immersive learning systems. In this conceptual paper, we reflect on the role of digitally captured embodied performances as boundary objects within our heterogeneous two-team collective of learning scientists and computer scientists as we design an embodied, animated virtual tutor embedded in a physically immersive mathematics learning system. Beyond just a communicative resource, we demonstrate how these digitized, embodied performances constitute a powerful mode for both inter- and intra-team learning and innovation. Our work illustrates the utility of mobilizing the material conditions of learning.

In this preliminary report, we propose a previously unidentified role that instructors’ gestures may play in helping students evaluate existing computer code. We find that instructors use gesture to animate processes encoded in the static inscriptions of computer programs in order to make invisible, dynamic phenomena perceptible to students. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the embodied instructional work of teaching programming.

We present a detailed account of interactional mechanisms that support participation in STEM disciplinary practices as an adult and a child explore a technology-enabled embodied learning environment for mathematics. Drawing on ethnomethodological studies of technologyrich workplaces, we trace the process of transforming a vague reference into a mutually available mathematical object: a covariant variable. Our analysis reveals that this mathematical object is an interactional achievement, configured via a reciprocal process of instructing one another's attention. In particular, we demonstrate how participants' explicit responsiveness to indexical and multimodal resources achieves this object.

We present a detailed account of the interactional work between a programming instructor and a middle school student that leads to the resolution of an elusive error in the student’s code. By tracing the fine details of how this resolution came to be, we demonstrate how learning to debug in face-to-face interactions resembles a process of enskilment.