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PurposeRelatively few studies have examined the perspectives of informal learning facilitators who play key roles in cultivating an equitable learning environment for nondominant youth and families in making and tinkering spaces. This study aims to foreground the perspectives of facilitators and highlight the complexities and tensions that influence their equity work. Design/methodology/approachInterviews were conducted with facilitators of making and tinkering spaces across three informal learning organizations: a museum, a public library system and a network of community technology centers. This study then used a framework that examined equity along dimensions of access to what, for whom, based on whose values and toward what ends to analyze both the explicit and implicit conceptions of equity that surfaced in these interviews. FindingsAcross organizations, this study identified similarities and differences in facilitators’ conceptualizations of equity that were influenced by their different contexts and had implications for practice at each organization. Highlighting the complexity of enacting equity in practice, this study found moments when dimensions of equity came together in resonant ways, while other moments showed how dimensions can be in tension with each other. Practical implicationsThe complexity that facilitators must navigate to enact equity in their practice emphasizes the need for professional development and support for facilitators to deepen their conceptions and practices around equity beyond access – not just skill building in making and tinkering. Originality/valueThis study recognizes the important role that facilitators play in enabling equity-oriented participation in making and tinkering spaces and contributes the “on the ground” perspectives of facilitators to highlight the complexity and tensions of enacting equity in practice. 

Educators are often described as practitioners and can be subject to deficit-oriented characterizations that position their work as focused on the passive dissemination of knowledge. This pictorial argues that educators are designers, and their curation of learning environments and experiences constitutes an underappreciated and complex design practice. Further, the design work that educators engage in is significant and consequential as it can define or reimagine who participates and what is valued in educational spaces – playing an important role in creating more equitable educational outcomes. In this pictorial, we leverage photos captured and curated by educators of their learning environments in library makerspaces and youth- serving technology centers to make their unseen design work and impact visible. Beyond making educators’ expertise more visible, this pictorial also offers design considerations for designers of technologies, materials, and experiences that may be situated in educational environments. 

Millions of children around the world learn to code by creating with Scratch and other block-based programming languages. However, these programming environments typically are not accessible for blind and visually impaired children to tinker, create, and learn alongside their sighted peers. This paper discusses the ongoing development of the OctoStudio coding app to support accessibility and tinkerability for blind and visually impaired learners. We discuss how we have applied core principles of tinkerability to create an accessible, mainstream app for use on mobile phones and tablets. We describe our iterative development process in collaboration with educators who specialize in the design and testing of accessible technologies for children. We conclude with suggestions for how the core principles of designing for tinkerability can be expanded to support accessibility and engagement of blind and visually impaired learners internationally. 

In designing equity-oriented learning environments around computing, it is important to consider how educators are structurally set up to reinscribe injustice. This poster presents a study of six pre-service teachers that were supported to confront “disciplinary ghosts,” experiences of harm related to computing in order to heal and re-envision alternative possibilities. We use the hauntological processes from Yoon and Chen (2022) as the starting point of a design framework towards healing. 

Facilitators in informal spaces play an integral role in creating equitable and engaging STEM rich learning environments for youth. However, the complexity of facilitator’s practices is often undertheorized. Infrastructuring, or the process of dynamically designing with infrastructures (Karasti, 2014) gives us one lens to start to understand this complexity. Building on Azevedo’s lines of practice theory (2011), we aim to show the value in tracing infrastructuring work overtime in order to understand how facilitators’ preferences and constraints are shaping their practice. In this paper we present two traces, called lines of infrastructuring, that make visible the dynamic infrastructuring work of facilitators as they engage in a research practice partnership developing and implementing computing activities in their spaces. We argue that this analysis provides a new lens for understanding the practices of facilitators, and the realities of embedded infrastructures that can restrain the potential for equitable transformation in this work. 

In our efforts to build transformative informal STEM learning environments, we must consider how innovative educational practices and tools are adaptable, sustainable, and equitable. The lens of infrastructuring allows us to attend to the ways that people, practices, and objects already present in these environments can be leveraged and redesigned to support equitable learning outcomes. Through qualitative analysis of 16 facilitator interviews across three informal STEM organizations, we determined six types of infrastructure that support engagement with computational tinkering in informal learning environments: institutional routines and resources, social and facilitation practices, institutional and facilitator values, facilitator expertise, tools and materials, and physical space. We also point out some critical gaps or challenges within these categories that can serve as points for reflection and redesign. This work has implications for researchers, designers, and facilitators/managers who work in informal STEM settings and aim to engage learners with STEM in new ways. 

In this poster, we share an example of designing for belonging in a new app for creative expression, developed in collaboration with community-based educators who are working to expand learning opportunities for children and families from marginalized groups. These partners are not recruited for a single participatory design event, but rather partnerships are emergent, ongoing, and part of a larger shared process to support more expressive, collaborative, and equitable computational experiences. We discuss three core design considerations that prioritize designing for belonging in the app influenced by global partners. 

There is growing interest in implementing computational resources, technologies, and experiences in informal learning environments like museums, makerspaces, libraries, and community centers. In this paper, we highlight six shared challenges facilitators in three different informal learning contexts encountered in designing and implementing computational activities for their participants. These challenges touch on facilitators’ identities, the relevance of existing materials, infrastructural constraints, visitors’ perceptions of computational tools, issues of equity, and technical challenges.