Peeking at Peaks: Looking at Aggregate Arousal Levels Across Youth in After-School Makerspace Activities

• In Event: Measuring Making: Methods, Tools, and Strategies for Capturing Learning, Participation, and Engagement in Maker Activities

Abstract

Much of the discourse around Making maintains the expectation that Maker activities will be highly engaging for youth, given how acts of creation and design can tie into prior interests and motivations (Dougherty, 2013; Peppler & Bender, 2013). However, it is overly simplistic to presume that all activities associated with Making remain consistently engaging for a youth or that all activities in a Makerspace are equally engaging to all youth. For instance, we know from ethnographic research of sustained participation in discretionary activities, forms of engagement and interest can and do vary across individuals and are subject to numerous influences (Azevedo, 2011).

Given the expectation that engagement will vary, we are posed with a methodological challenge of identifying and documenting group level engagement when it is being realized. While some survey instruments exist, their use tends to produce overall appraisals rather than moment-to-moment changes. In the work described in this poster, we describe efforts to use wearable devices – namely, electrodermal activity sensors and GoPro video cameras – to obtain records of engagement by looking at psychophysiological arousal. Briefly, when we our attention is drawn by immediate stimuli, the sympathetic nervous system sends signals that alter the behavior of sweat glands in our skin in a matter of seconds. Laboratory studies have shown this leads to a detectable change in skin conductivity, and recent advances in development of wearable sensors now allows for researchers to obtain continuous streams of such conductivity data (Poh, Swenson, & Picard, 2010).

We have thus been collecting data from multiple six-week afterschool programs targeted primarily at adolescent girls at a rural-serving community Makerspace in the Mountain West. As the data collection involves youth in a noisy and active environment, the data streams are complicated, with many different moments containing a number of small changes in skin conductivity. To help identify when there are moments of heightened arousal, from which we then reference video records to see if it appears to be positively-valenced moments of heightened engagement, we have adapted a method first described in Cain & Lee (2016) that involves detecting relative peaks in skin conductivity that are greater than one standard deviation above the mean change. These are suggestive of moments that led to sudden and distinct shifts in arousal levels. In our current work, we then aggregate data from all youth participants to see what moments and activities have higher peak densities than others. For instance, we have seen that instructor led instruction time at the beginning of a six-week session can yield high peak densities, likely because of the newness of the project that is being introduced and the opportunity to learn about the other participants in the afterschool program. That decreases during subsequent weeks, but then scheduled opportunities to decorate and customize built artifacts then become high peak density moments. In this poster, we show how peak density changes across two six week camps and what this implies about when and how arousal and engagement change over time in this afterschool Maker program.

Authors

• Victor R. Lee, Utah State University

• Liam Fischback, Utah State University

• Aditya Chandel, Utah State University

• Ryan Cain, Utah State University