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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. 

Electronics prototyping platforms such as Arduino enable a wide variety of creators with and without an engineering background to rapidly and inexpensively create interactive prototypes. By opening up the process of prototyping to more creators, and by making it cheaper and quicker, prototyping platforms and toolkits have undoubtedly shaped the HCI community. With this workshop, we aim to understand how recent trends in technology, from reprogrammable digital and analog arrays to printed electronics, and from metamaterials to neurally-inspired processors, might be leveraged in future prototyping platforms and toolkits. Our goal is to go beyond the well-established paradigm of mainstream microcontroller boards, leveraging the more diverse set of technologies that already exist but to date have remained relatively niche. What is the future of electronics prototyping toolkits? How will these tools fit in the current ecosystem? What are the new opportunities for research and commercialization? 

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. 

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.