To make computer science (CS) more equitable, many educational efforts are shifting foci from access and content understanding to include identification, agency, and social change. As part of these efforts, we look at how learners perceive themselves in relation to what they believe CS is and what it means to participate in CS. Informed by three design lenses, unblackboxing, culturally responsive computing, and creative production, we designed a physical computing kit and activities. Drawing from qualitative analysis of interviews, artifacts, and observation of six young people in a weeklong summer workshop, we report on the experiences of two young Black women designers. We found that using these materials young people were able to: leverage personal goals and prior experiences in computing work; feel as if they were figuring out computing systems; and recognize computational technologies as created by people for particular purposes. We observed that while the mix of materials and activities created some frustration for participants, it also prompted processes of community building and inquiry. We discuss implications for design of computational tools in equity-centered CS education and pose seamfulness as an emergent heuristic when designing for learning that engages young people with the social, not just material, systems of computing.
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I Played a Song with the Help of a Magic Banana: Assessing Short-term Making Events
Purpose
Designers of learning experiences are concerned with how people learn across a range of
timescales from a semester to a single moment in time. And just as designing
experiences at different timescales requires unique goals, tools, and processes, measuring what people learn from their interactions is also timescale-specific. The aim of our work is twofold: 1)
To understand how learners describe their experiences with short-term, introductory maker
experiences and; 2) To test a method for assessing learners’ experiences authentic to short-term
learning.
Design
We collected written responses from participants at a two-day event, STEM Center Learning Days. Through an analysis of 707 unique instances of learner responses to participation in drop-in maker activities, we examined how participants describe their short-term learning experiences.
Findings
We found that although some activities appear to onlookers to create passive experiences for learners, these seemingly passive moments have a significant impact on learners. In addition, some learners described themselves as working in tandem with tools to make something work and other learners viewed the tools as working autonomously. We found that our assessment method allowed us to gain an understanding of how learners describe their experiences offering important implications for understanding short-term learning events.
Originality/ Implications
Our findings provide researchers studying short-term learning in its natural setting a new method to understand how learners make sense of their individual experience. Further, designers of short-term learning experiences may gain insights into their unique activities and indications of where additional guidance and scaffolds will improve small learning moments.
Keywords
Makerspaces, STEM, assessment
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- Award ID(s):
- 1639915
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10219804
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information and learning sciences
- ISSN:
- 2398-5348
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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