CoBuild: Creating Online Supports for Making at Home

• In Event: Informal Learning Is Not Canceled: Research and Program Implementation During a Global Pandemic

Abstract

Our project - CoBuild19 - set out to address the large-scale shift to at-home learning based on nationwide school closures through creating making/STEM activities for families. To address these needs, our project team developed approximately 60 STEM activities for families with children in grades K-6 that make use of items readily available in most households and delivered fully online. The activities were designed through collaborations with museums including the Amazeum (AR), The Tech Museum of Innovation (CA), the Indiana State Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum (CA), and maker education groups including the Sonoma County Office of Education and Maker Educator Collective.
The curricular intent of the project was to fill the void for families seeking activities to engage their children while quarantining. The research aim of the project was to investigate strategies for enabling families to actively engage with STEM while at home during the pandemic. Using a design-based research approach, we incorporated various instructional strategies to improve engagement and evaluate how well they worked. At a basic level, this focus forced us to question how we evaluated engagement with the online maker activities.
The project used Facebook as the primary mechanism for sharing activity ideas. The team started a Facebook group in March that quickly grew to over 4000 members. From March through June, we produced and shared videos and activity guides, averaging five new activities per week.
Initially, we planned to analyze social media data (e.g., resource downloads, use of tracked links, and Likes/Shares/Follows) to refine and improve the activities and programming and learn about the ways families engaged in the activities. After a few weeks of posting activities and challenges, we found that we got many video views, “Likes” and other positive metrics, but we got very few submissions of videos, images, or text about what families were making, which limited us in terms of analyzing how families engaged with the activities. We polled members of the Facebook group about their activity use, and the responses (n=101) were dominated by We are glad to know the ideas are available, but we are not using much (49%), followed by We occasionally do activities (35%). These responses were consistent with the lack of project submissions, so we decided to experiment with different approaches.
The largest strategic shift was to focus efforts on conducting virtual maker/STEM camps within which we expected to see greater participation. We completed two rounds of camp by the end of July, serving approximately 75 campers. We believe we are collecting much richer data, in the form of recorded Zoom sessions where campers make synchronously with educators and Flipgrid videos that youth create to share their process and products for each activity. In our second camp, we experimented with the amount of facilitation guidance we provided to parents/caregivers for each activity. We will evaluate all of these data to determine what range of engagement exists across participants and what malleable factors may be associated with deeper engagement.

Author

• Adam V. Maltese, Indiana University