Angry Birds Revisited: Making Connections Between Mathematics and Physics Meaningful and Joyful

Connecting mathematical reasoning with physical sensemaking remains challenging for many students, and interdisciplinary STEM instruction often struggles to integrate disciplines without one overshadowing the other. This paper presents a digital task sequence designed to support students in making meaningful and joyful connections between mathematics and physics. The design draws on research in mathematics and physics education concerning students' development of meanings for graphs as representations of relationships between quantities and for projectile motion, together with research on students' meaning‐making and the affordances of game‐based learning. We illustrate the task sequence through a teaching experiment involving two ninth‐grade students. The students developed productive meanings for graphs and key ideas of projectile motion by coordinating these ideas throughout the task sequence, demonstrating how meaningful interdisciplinary learning can emerge through joyful engagement. These findings illustrate one approach to designing and implementing meaningful and joyful interdisciplinary STEM learning experiences.