ECT Brownbag: Marcelo Worsley 

Sports and technology are often pitted as being at odds with one another. While there are several educational activities that make reference to sports, we seldom see sports used as an authentic context for learning computing. In this talk, I discuss the design of Data in Motion, a curriculum that considers the bi-directional opportunities for sports to improve learning of STEM and for STEM to help improve participants’ athletic performance. We implemented Data in Motion as a five-day summer camp with 33 participants, grades 2–6. We observe the ways that the experience changes students’ perceptions of the connection between sports and technology through student surveys, observations and artifact analyses. Across the pool of participants, we saw significant changes in the ways that students conceptualized the connection between technology and athletic performance. Based on these findings, we suggest that practice-linked learning, specifically in the context of sports and technology, is a generative space for students to authentically explore interests in both disciplines.