Making Innovators: Youth Collaboratively Designing Wearable, Bidirectionally Responsive Games as a Model of Epistemic Agency

• In Event: 34.028 - From Making to Agentic Participation: Perspectives on and Approaches to Fostering Epistemic Engagement in Making

Abstract

Purpose. Makerspaces and their associated accessible toolkits are not only reengaging students in STEM interests and creatively connecting those to arts, crafts and other interest activities (Kafai, Fields & Searle, 2014), but also making the systematic process of fabrication and design more visible through accessible digital and physical toolkits (Resnick, Berg & Eisenberg, 2000). Maker activities and literacies can further help foster epistemic agency (Stroupe, 2014), particularly if learners are meaningfully engaged as creators and collaborators. Allison Druin (2002) found that, while design partnerships allow for the most epistemic agency from children, who become integral members in the design process, most efforts to engage children in design have historically put them in the peripheral roles of users, testers and informants.

This poster details an effort to foster epistemic making both with the curricula and through the connection of accessible toolkits offering different material and intrinsic affordances. This effort integrated game design, crafting and coding using currently available toolkits combined to facilitate the design of wearable and bidirectionally responsive games (Richard, 2015; Richard & Kafai, 2015). Bidrectionally responsive design (BRD) (Richard, 2015) models complex embedded and hybrid systems design, but utilizes simplified toolkits to fabricate simultaneously physically and digitally responsive systems. In this instantiation, learners learned how to combine the MakeyMakey, Scratch, and the Lilypad Arduino (a microprocessor for creating electronic textiles), coded with ModKit, a block based coding environment (Figure 2).

Setting and Participants. The curricula was taught twice to different cohorts of diverse ninth grade youth, aged 14-15, from a public, urban, magnet school in the Northeastern US as an 8-week mini-course (part of an out-of-school learning experience of their choosing). Student teams of 2-3 individuals came up with their own final project ideas.
Data, Results and Significance. Using Brennan and Resnick’s computational thinking framework (2012), I analyzed the physical and digital artifacts, as well as in class observations and post-interviews. Overall findings point to increased epistemic agency in areas of practice (iterating, debugging, remixing, and abstracting) as well as perspectives, such as expressing creativity, and seeing collaboration as distributed and meaningful learning. For example, Israh lead her team in designing an interactive pet game, complete with a wearable controller, which would change colors when triggered. She articulated shifts in her own agency through the use of different toolkits with different affordances and through the process of teamwork:
It definitely showed me a different side of computing, like with the MakeyMakey… [which I could] connect with Scratch. I didn't know about that… [and] with the Lilypad… At first, I was like, “Oh I probably wouldn't be able to do this”… I [also] found [computing and coding] boring. People just sit there and type up stuff… [but] it’s actually a lot of interactive work with your people… Definitely did change my mindset…
The poster will detail the curriculum and provide cases of how the activities fostered epistemic agency through BRD. Exploring shifts in students’ agency and computational thinking in two key contexts simultaneously (Scratch and e-textiles) represents a significant contribution.

Author

• Gabriela T. Richard, The Pennsylvania State University