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Understanding Context in Children's Use of Smartwatches for Everyday Science Reflections

Although much has been written about the benefits of situated learning, its technology implementations have remained bounded in space and time in the form of scheduled sessions or designated spaces. Relatively little research has investigated how learning can be situated in the messy world outside of formal learning contexts. We propose that wearables like smartwatches, because of their intrinsic attributes such as persistence and ease-of-access, present an apt opportunity to explore how such 'messy' situated learning can happen. This paper investigates the notion of context in a 3-week study whereby 18 elementary school students used a custom smartwatch app called ScienceStories to record reflections related to specific science topics throughout the course of their everyday lives. We advance a context model of wearables as situated reflection tools, and present our study findings that detail 'when' (time periods), 'where' (locations), 'why' (triggers) and 'how' (interactions of contextual dimensions) children made science reflections using the smartwatches. We conclude from our findings that a certain tension exists between watch interactions for the purpose of reflections and real-life experiences. We expected the watch to function alongside the child's everyday life but evidence points to a dialectic model. The work serves to inform the design of educational wearable apps perhaps to eventually move towards becoming effectively context-aware.