This experience was designed to support 11-12 year old children in moving from an exploratory learning situation to more formal conceptual learning about ecology. Specifically we were interested in seeing how the practical experience in the woodland might help them to understand the more formal concepts of food chains and webs taught in school. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the effectiveness of using tangible media for supporting explicit expression of formal concepts using concrete examples from information discovered in the woodland. A horizontal display was used, where children interacted with a map of the woodland displaying the information they had found. Physical tokens were used to represent organisms found in the wood. Children used physical links to join together organisms into a food web.  The interactive display Preliminary findings from our studies show that this activity enabled children to see similarities and differences between two habitats, as well as the interrelationships between them. By using physical tokens they are required to explicitly make links and thus become aware of discrepancies and nonsensical links, enabling them to reflect on their ongoing activity between and within themselves. After building up food webs with physical tokens, the children were asked to draw food webs on paper using a subset of the organisms found in the wood.  Food web constructed with physical tokens  The food web |