ABSTRACT
In the past decade, many curricular efforts have been developed under the label of project-based learning that provide students with “long-term, problem-focused, integrative and meaningful units of instructions” (Blumenfeld, Soloway, Marx, Krajcik, Guzdial, & Palincsar, 1991, p. 370). Project-based learning approaches have been developed for a variety of subject matters such as mathematics (e.g., Harel, 1991; Kafai, 1995; Shaffer, 2002), sciences (Brown, 1992; Colella, 2002; Davis, 2003; Kafai & Ching, 2001; Linn, Bell, & Hsi, 1998; Penner, Lehrer, & Schauble, 1998; Sandoval, 2003), engineering (Hmelo, Holton, & Kolodner, 2000; Roth, 1998), and social sciences (Erickson & Lehrer, 1998). In all of these projects, collaborative interactions among students, teachers, and computational tools are seen as instrumental. Students are often asked to work in teams and create collaborative products. Most, but not all, of these projects integrate computer use in various forms: In some instances, students use computers to create collaborative research reports and presentations, in others, students use computers to design and implement their own software.
