Infrastructuring Strategies in Making Activities: Student Empowerment Through Value-Driven Learning

• In Event: Making at the Margins: Engaging Underserved Communities in Maker Technologies, Activities, and Spaces

Abstract

Engaging and motivating all types of students to participate in making with computing is a persistent challenge. However, researchers have begun to untangle the complexity of socio-cultural characteristics impacting students’ participation, motivation, and engagement in these fields. Researchers have successfully created inclusive making environments for particular demographics through targeted interventions designed to integrate the values of their students into the learning experience (ex. [1,2,7,8]). While these interventions have demonstrated success, they are often highly prescriptive to specific situations and groups, and lack transferability to apply the findings over time or with other types of students. We propose integrating meta-design processes into making activities to create dynamic learning experiences that scaffold students to reflect on their own values and integrate those values into their making activities and artifacts. Facilitating the students to lead the design of making activities empowers them to decide what values are important and to design a personally value-driven educational experience with making.

Meta-design is a type of participatory design that scaffolds users to continually re-design and refine a design to appropriate it for their own needs [3-6]. In education, the educator creates the learning environment to enable the learners to become active in directing their own experience by choosing themes and tasks they value. One key feature of meta-design is that the initial design can evolve and flexibly support change empowering the student to guide their experience appropriately. This is imperative to enabling students with diverse values to integrate them in the same learning environment. Our work investigates creating this type of educational experience in a learning environment by incorporating infrastructuring strategies into two making activities: the Día de los Muertos Interactive Puppets and the MoveLab. The Día de los Muertos activity presents the learners with a driving design challenge to create an interactive art piece representing someone who has passed away. The participants reflect on people who have been important in their lives, cultural practices around death and mourning, and ways that they can express these complicated concepts with physical computing. The MoveLab workshop was an outreach program designed to engage middle and high school girls in computing and dance. The five-day workshop placed the girls in a collaborative environment to work with dancers, choreographers, computer scientists, and engineers to create dance performances integrating microcontrollers. The project exposed the girls to dance and physical computing, enabling them to learn high-level concepts within both domains.

Both of these maker activities incorporate a variety of infrastructuring to facilitate meta-design processes. Our findings demonstrate both success and breakdowns with the techniques incorporated into the making activities. Students across demographics were able to engage in the activities reflecting and integrating their values into the making environment. However, breakdowns occurred in the activities where students faced cultural challenges leading to varying levels of agency and engagement. Our work presents these findings and reflects on the use of infrastructuring strategies in making to promote student engagement and motivation in learning activities leading to empowerment with the technology.

Authors

• Kayla DesPortes, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Betsy DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology