Scaffolding Design for Teachers: A Critical Component of Participatory Design (Poster 8)

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Designerly Thinking and Participatory Design With Students, Teachers, Administrators, and Community Members

Abstract

Objectives. As designers of learning technology, we face two major challenges with Participatory Design (PD). First, reservations about giving stakeholders key access to designing technology. Second, creating an environment where stakeholders have capacity and empowerment to contribute to the design. In this poster, we introduce Beat Empire design process as an example of PD that addresses these issues. Beats Empire is a learning assessment game to help non-computer science teachers integrate computational data and analyze in their classrooms. In the process of designing Beats Empire, we utilized PD methods, scaffolding the participants' collaboration on the design, to help us better understand how to design the game for learning objectives and diverse classrooms (Basu et al., 2020).

Perspective. PD, from the Scandinavian tradition (Ehn, 1993), is often misinterpreted by educational researchers as simply getting input from participants or design research (DiSalvo et al., 2017). The distinction between PD and design research is not simple. While PD is a type of design research, it is also a continual practice and democratic philosophy that is held up during the design process (DiSalvo & DiSalvo, 2014). A critical distinction is that with PD the design researcher scaffolds design activities to prompt exploration of the context for designing, encourage reflection, and provide participants building blocks to create designs without any expertise in design.

Methods. Using Beats Empire PD process as an example, we will reflect on how the activities scaffolded teachers to reflect on current ways they may be teaching data and analysis in their class and how they might design future learning opportunities. Teachers were guided through a set of design activities in which they discussed the relevance of the data and analysis strand to their current instruction and reflected on the use of digital games for assessment. We structure the session to prompt contributions on the game design and to understand the broader ecology of the classroom and formative assessments they might use.

Data. Presenting this PD work on Beat Empire is an opportunity to explore scaffolding of the design process for non-experts, while still empowering them in the design discussion. To understand their thinking behind the design work they did, we analyzed recordings of designs sessions, observation notes, and artifacts produced.

Results. Our design takeaways from these sessions produced actionable items that would have been difficult for teachers to articulate without this experience with the design process:

● A game focused on learning about data has potential for cross-disciplinary use but will fit better with certain subjects.
● The amount of time the game takes to learn and play needs to be short and flexible so teachers can fit the game in with the other material.
● Teachers will need guidance to understand assessment data, and a teacher dashboard will be a critical part of the design.

Scholarly Significance. By scaffolding stakeholders in the design process, we encourage wholistic reflections, with designers and participants uncovering aspect of the design they never anticipated and giving greater and more democratic input into design of learning technology.

Author

• Betsy DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology