How do you Play with a Robotic Toy Animal? A long-term study of Pleo

Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market, taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was interacted with and reflected upon in the homes of six families during 2 to 10 months. Our analysis emphasizes a discrepancy between the participants’ initial desires to borrow a Pleo and what they reported later on about their actual experiences. Further, the data suggests an apparent tension between participants expecting the robot to work as a ‘toy’ while making consistent comparisons with real pet animals. We end by discussing a series of implications for design of this category of toys, in order to better maintain interest and engagement over time

Bridging Education and Engineering Students through a Wind Energy-Focused Community Engagement Project

Regional growth in offshore wind energy development, changes to the state’s K-12 science standards, and a desire to deepen undergraduate student learning coalesced to inspire an interdisciplinary community engagement project bridging university courses in engineering and education. The project consists of three main activities: a professional development event for local fourth grade teachers, five classroom lessons designed and taught by undergraduate engineering and education majors, and a final celebration event, all focused around the topics of wind energy and engineering design. This spring, the project was carried out for the third consecutive year, though each year’s implementation has been unique due to the timing of the onset of COVID-19. Analysis of responses from the Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale and an end-of-semester course survey demonstrate growth in student learning and transferrable skills from participating in the semester-long project. Additionally, exploration of students’ narrative work provides a richness to further understanding their growth and challenges they confronted. This interdisciplinary community engagement project will continue into future years, with improvements informed by the findings of this work, most notably with the hope of returning to a fully in-person delivery of lessons to fourth-graders

Using "tangibles" to promote novel forms of playful learning

Tangibles, in the form of physical artefacts that are electronically augmented and enhanced to trigger various digital events to happen, have the potential for providing innovative ways for children to play and learn, through novel forms of interacting and discovering. They offer, too, the scope for bringing playfulness back into learning. To this end, we designed an adventure game, where pairs of children have to discover as much as they can about a virtual imaginary creature called the Snark, through collaboratively interacting with a suite of tangibles. Underlying the design of the tangibles is a variety of transforms, which the children have to understand and reflect upon in order to make the Snark come alive and show itself in a variety of morphological and synaesthesic forms. The paper also reports on the findings of a study of the Snark game and discusses what it means to be engrossed in playful learning

Designing for Critical Algorithmic Literacies

As pervasive data collection and powerful algorithms increasingly shape children's experience of the world and each other, their ability to interrogate computational algorithms has become crucially important. A growing body of work has attempted to articulate a set of "literacies" to describe the intellectual tools that children can use to understand, interrogate, and critique the algorithmic systems that shape their lives. Unfortunately, because many algorithms are invisible, only a small number of children develop the literacies required to critique these systems. How might designers support the development of critical algorithmic literacies? Based on our experience designing two data programming systems, we present four design principles that we argue can help children develop literacies that allow them to understand not only how algorithms work, but also to critique and question them

Exploring students’ iterative practices when learning with physical computing kits through data visualisations

Physical computing kits allow the practical implementation of open-ended, hands-on, interactive learning experiences in the classroom. In the process of engaging with physical computing kits, students formulate and implement self-constructed goals using an iterative approach. However, the openness and diversity of such learning contexts often make them challenging to design and support. The field of learning analytics has the potential to support project-based learning, using continuous real-time data traces arising from student interactions. Data visualisations, specifically, can provide reflective opportunities for teachers to analyse students’ actions and act based on this evidence. However, to date, there has been little data visualisation research targeted at learning with physical computing kits. This thesis reports progress into the design and evaluation of a suite of data visualisations focussed on students’ iterative design process when using physical computing kits in authentic classroom settings. The areas of iterative design, appropriation theory, process-driven learning analytics and data visualisation inform the analysis and interpretation of trace data collected from students’ interactions. The contribution of the thesis is three-fold. First, a model for examining students’ trace data in keeping with social processes, such as appropriation, is presented. Secondly, insights into the iterative design process of students engaging in open-ended projects are produced, as they emerge from our data visualisations, across multiple groups of students. Thirdly, an evaluation into the role and potential of using data visualisations in the classroom is conducted with ten teachers. Implications for the design and support of open-ended project-based learning experiences with physical computing kits using trace data and data visualisation are discussed based on the teachers’ feedback. The thesis represents a first step towards the design of context-aligned, process-oriented data visualisations to provide evidence-based reflective opportunities to support students’ iterative design behaviours in this learning setting

Selecting and evoking innovators:combining democracy and creativity

The practical undertaking of selecting users to work as innovators and of evoking their creative potential is crucial, but underexposed in the literature on user involvement in design. This paper reports findings from a recent case of user-driven innovation, the FEEDBACK-project, where the authors prepared for and conducted selection of and collaboration with innovators. The outcome was successful in the sense that the innovators produced excellent foundation for conceptual interaction design by creating mock-ups and explanations incarnating their preferences, attitudes and habits. By referring to theories of learning we try to explain how our way of working with selection and evoking of innovators has contributed to this positive result and how our approach to user-driven innovation can be regarded as a way to combine democracy and creativity in design. Author Keywords User-driven innovation, selection and evoking processes

MAKEngineering Kits: Design Principles for Family Engineering Experiences

Research has consistently highlighted the importance of promoting child-parent interactions. In this essay, we describe the development of MAKEngineering kits that provide collaborative learning experiences for children in Grades 2–6 to engage in engineering design tasks with members of their families in their home environment. First, we present five design principles that emerged through a design-based research approach. Second, we used data from our research project to examine the impact of the MAKEngineering kits, guided by each design principle, on children’s and parents’ experiences as engineering learners and/or educators. In attending to both of these purposes, we argue for the inclusion of the five design principles in engineering-based programs as a way to guide parent-child interactions and support families as engineering learners and educators. One significance of this paper lies in the kits’ potential to diminish lack of access to other nonformal learning environments, as well as support parents as engineering educators in an everyday context

Make or Shake: An Empirical Study of the Value of Making in Learning about Computing Technology

Learning about computing technology has become an increasingly important part of the school curriculum but it remains unclear how best to teach it to children. Here, we report on an empirical study that investigated how the process of making affects how children of different ages learn about computing technology. In one condition, they had to first make an electronic cube before conducting other activities and in the other they were given a ready made one to use. The results of the study show that for younger children, the making significantly improved their performance in a post-lesson test, whereas the older children performed equally well in both conditions. We discuss possible reasons for this, in terms of differences in creative appropriation. We also saw much spontaneous collaboration between the children that suggests making can encourage a collaborative relationship between children of different ages

Play platforms for children’s creativity

Serie : Springer series on cultural computing, ISSN 2195-9056Children’s imagination and their natural need for exploration and discovery can be stimulated when they are in contact with rich contexts and environments (Van Scoter et al. 2001; Van Scoter 2008); this inherent tendency offers an enormous opportunity for researchers and designers to develop tools that unleash children’s potential, involving them in creating meaningful projects (Papert 1993). Research on this field has highlighted that well-design technological tools for children need to be compelling, support exploration, encourage creativity, develop curiosity and promote interaction and collaboration with peers while being simple and intuitive to use (Plowman et al. 2012; Resnick et al. 2005; Resnick and Silverman 2005).FCT, QREN, COMPETE, FEDRCIEC – Research Centre on Child Studies, IE, UMinho (FCT R&D unit 317), Portuga