Interweaving the digital and physical worlds in collaborative project-based learning experiences

The purpose of this chapter is to help educators and educational scholars consider new possibilities for interweaving the digital and physical worlds in order to reconsider disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning across academic curricula. To explore how print and digital media may be interwoven to support children's creation of physical artifacts in project-based learning environments, the author describes uses to which students in one fifth grade class put multimodal print and digital texts as they collaborated in small groups to design robots. The author identifies the range of textual resources used across phases of the engineering design task in order to examine the interplay between digital and print-based texts in the design and production of physical artifacts. Focusing on the role of digital texts in this project-based learning experience, episodes of collaborative talk illustrate student processes of consuming and producing texts.