Making Pet Toys and Environments at Home in a Virtual Summer Camp

• In Event: Moving Making to Online and Homes Spaces: Lessons for Maker Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: In summer 2020, we planned to hold a summer camp to engage adolescents and their pets in science, design, and making, with the goal of enriching the pets’ lives based on a deeper understanding and consideration of their sensory perceptions. COVID-19 necessitated running the entire program with facilitators and participants at home. We aimed to connect empathy and care for pets with engagement in science and engineering practices (National Research Council, 2012). We will share our remote summer camp design, key advantages of at-home learning revealed by our study, and implications for making-oriented education.

Theoretical framework: Our perspective is informed by sociocultural, practice, and situated learning theories. We see home-based funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) as potentially informing, motivating, and contextualizing learning. We facilitated in situ co-design projects based on ethnomethodological and CSCW-style field work (Dourish & Button, 1998; Salkind, 2010), drawing on notions of co-design with non-human stakeholders from Animal-Computer Interaction (Hirskyj-Douglas, et al., 2017). We see ourselves, our knowledge, and our culture as deeply interconnected with and part of the natural world, in naturecultures (Haraway, 2003).

Methods and Data Sources: 13 youths (ages 13-16), 9 dogs, and 5 cats participated in our study. We shipped materials to participants to support their activities, and provided two SnapChat lenses that simulate canine and feline color perception, visual acuity, and brightness discrimination. In Week 1, youth engaged in scientific inquiry and investigation of their pets’ senses, and observed their pets’ behaviors. In Week 2, participants co-designed a new toy or space in their home. Each day of camp consisted of synchronous online activity over Zoom, followed by asynchronous activities. Data included participants’ at-home blog work, in-class collaborative work, Zoom recordings, and exit interviews. We performed a thematic analysis, focusing on participants’ engagement in at-home activities with their pets, and on how being at home shaped their scientific practices and experiences.

Results: Working from home allowed youth to build on their funds of knowledge from their relationships and cohabitation with their pets. They enacted ethnomethodological field work that produced authentic naturalistic data about their pets, and informed hypotheses and design work. Working from home allowed participants to create projects integrated seamlessly into home life, and enabled participants to engage their pets in all stages of the design process—understanding stakeholder requirements, prototyping, evaluating, and revising. One downside of remote participation was a lack of social connection among campers, but facilitators were able to use networked technologies and inscriptional tools to provide ongoing scaffolding.

Significance: Despite applying an asynchronous, distributed learning model out of necessity, we believe some level of situated, asynchronous at-home work can contribute widely to learning designs. Future iterations could address the social isolation we encountered by enhancing interpersonal interaction and collaboration, while still situating core experimental and observational work within participants’ homes. The key takeaway is that educational designs for place and time should consider when and how being at home can be an asset, for instance enabling naturalistic ethnomethodological fieldwork and design work.

Authors

• Joseph L. Polman, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Shaun Kane, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ben Shapiro, University of Colorado - Boulder