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This paper draws on critical perspectives and a specific design case of learning in making with physical computing cards to argue that unblackboxing as a design goal must go beyond technical or computational aspects of computational making. Taking a justice-oriented stance on computing education, we review earlier perspectives on unblackboxing in computing education and their limitations to support equitable learning for young people. As a provocation and practical guide for designers and educators, we propose the idea of deblackboxing, and outline a set of prompts, organized into four areas, or layers – disciplinary knowledge and practice, externalities, histories, and possible futures. Tools and materials designed through the lens of deblackboxing could provide new possibilities for interaction, production, and pedagogy in makerspaces. We demonstrate how these might be applied in the design of a set of creative physical computing materials used with youth in a weeklong summer workshop.
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Making Computing Visible & Tangible: A paper-based computing toolkit for codesigning inclusive computing education activities
MCVT (Making Computing Visible and Tangible) Cards are a toolkit of paper-based computing cards intended for use in the codesign of inclusive computing education. Working with groups of teachers and students over multiple design sessions, we share our toolkit, design drivers and material considerations; and use cases drawn from a week-long codesign workshop where seven teachers made and adapted cards for their future classroom facilitation. Our findings suggest that teachers valued the MCVT toolkit as a resource for their own learning and perceived the cards to be useful for supporting new computational practices, specifically for learning through making and connecting to examples of everyday computing. Critically reviewed by teachers during codesign workshops, the toolkit however posed some implementation challenges and constraints for learning through making and troubleshooting circuitry. From teacher surveys, interviews, workshop video recordings, and teacher-constructed projects, we show how teachers codesigned new design prototypes and pedagogical activities while also adapting and extending paper-based computing materials so their students could take advantage of the unique technical and expressive affordances of MCVT Cards. Our design research contributes a new perspective on using interactive paper computing cards as a medium for instructional materials development to support more inclusive computing education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2030880
- PAR ID:
- 10535440
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 2212-8689
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 100602
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.100602
