Hand Movements and Learning: Movement Profiles of Learning-by-Making

Learning by making has become an important paradigm in all levels of education because of its conjectured benefits for conceptual understanding, creativity, problem-solving, and design. The theory underpinning the development of conceptual understanding through making is 4E cognition, which argues that cognition is grounded in the body, movement, and interaction with the environment. Effective support for learners as they make, however, remains a challenge owing to a limited understanding of the processes that lead to learning as students make. In this work, we report on a study with undergraduate engineering students who worked on a making task. A set of hand movement features implicated in learning-by-making are identified from literature, extracted through validated computer vision models, and clustered to identify movement profiles. The results show three clusters, one with positive learning gain and two with no or negative learning gains, each with its own distinctive set of hand movement related features. Thus this work contributes to an understanding of the processes of learning-by-making, with potential implications for the development of learning support for students as they make.