In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inqu... more In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down
and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new direct... more and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on “Layered Elaboration, ” a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. THE FOUNDATIONS OF LAYERED ELABORATION The concept for Layered Elaboration has its roots in storyboarding for interactive media [5], paper prototyping [8], and annotation tools [6]. Storyboards and drawings have been used as a method in participatory design research
When children learn how to program, they gain problemsolving skills useful to them all throughout... more When children learn how to program, they gain problemsolving skills useful to them all throughout life. How can we attract more children in K-8 to learn about programming and be excited about it? To answer this question, we worked with a group of children aged 7-12 as our design partners. By partnering with the children, we were able to discover approaches to the topic that might appeal to our target audience. Using the children’s input from one design partnering session, we designed a prototype tangible programming experience based upon the theme of cooking. The children evaluated this prototype and gave us additional design ideas in a second session. We plan to use the children’s design ideas to guide our future work.
As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and t... more As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. .Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team, including adults and children ages 7 -- 11 years old, used the technique to design both a game about history and a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation.
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 2021
Dialog with a social pedagogical robot or agent is a powerful way for kids to learn [1, 5] but ma... more Dialog with a social pedagogical robot or agent is a powerful way for kids to learn [1, 5] but may limit the formation of an agentic relationship with the technology [9]. One main purpose of conversational agents is to allow the user to have a natural interaction that reduces the need to learn artificial conventions [6], but dialog systems fall short with respect to failure recovery, vocabulary diversity, remembering conversational history, and other measures [2, 3]. Further, Hill et. al. [4] found that people adapt their model of communication to match a chatbot’s in the same way they do with a child or non-native speaker. Thus, users conversing with a pedagogical agent are implicitly trained to shape their behavior to suit the technology rather than shaping the technology. For young learners, particularly among populations that have been historically excluded from technology fields, this limits agency and reinforces marginalizing power structures [9]. This project combines a conversational agent with ideas of agentic engagement to help middle-school-aged children learn computational thinking. Agentic engagement is defined as students’ constructive contribution into the flow of instruction and includes behaviors such as expressing interests, preferences, and opinions. It has been positively correlated to learning performance and motivation [7, 8]. Combined with a culturally responsive curriculum (CRC), agentic engagement may help to foster an agentic relationship with technology. Our system encourages learners to engage agentically by using programming constructs to change the agent’s vocabulary, recognizing the intent behind a user utterance (an invocation), and defining the action the agent will take to respond to an invocation. Students use computational thinking concepts such as pattern recognition, abstraction, and decomposition to convert ideas into commands for the dialog system and to understand which of their ideas can’t be programmed with the technology as presented. They learn both to personalize the system today and to see the agent as a technosocial construct that they can shape in the future. Programming can be accomplished either using Google’s Blockly visual programming tool (https://developers.google.com/blockly) or through conversation with the agent itself. The agent is embodied as a robot character, so agent actions can be verbal, physical, or both. Through social dialog with the agent, learners reflect on how computational thinking is relevant to themselves and their communities as part of a CRC, building on the work of Stewart et. al. [10]. For example, learners may be asked to reflect on the relationship between greeting behaviors and identity. After designing a greeting interaction, learners program the dialog system to achieve the greeting. Then learners may be asked to imagine how they might hypothetically enhance the dialog system to make it even more capable of implementing their preferences. In parallel to the development of the dialog system and curriculum, we will also adapt Reeve’s agentic engagement instrument [7] for CRC. Our contributions will include this instrument, insights into the relationship between agentic engagement and an agentic relationship with technology, and insights into how a programmable dialog system impacts agentic engagement and learning computational thinking.
• Why? Programming allows children to explore creative topics and learn problem-solving skills. •... more • Why? Programming allows children to explore creative topics and learn problem-solving skills. • How? With tangible programming, children can easily work together and move around. • Design partnering [2] refers to a design process in which children actively help create the design. • The Kidsteam project is a vehicle for design partnering at the University of Maryland. • In our two 2-hour design sessions, there were 4 or more children (aged 7-12) and 6 or more adults. • To demonstrate our goals, we began by presenting a prototype for collaborative music programming made by Tarkan. • Musically-themed tangibles reappropriated as cooking objects • System supported iteration, deletion, and audio-tutorial • Wizard-of-oz execution • Sounds, Alice [1] simulation of cooking, and Java-like code as output
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011
Abstract In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Coopera... more Abstract In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down. ... Keywords Co-design, children, participatory design, techniques, cooperative inquiry, games ... ACM Classification Keywords H5.0. Information interfaces and presentation: General. ... References [1] Walsh, G., Druin, A., Guha, ML, et al. Layered elaboration: a new technique for co-design with children. Proceedings of the ...
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, 2013
Recent statistics indicate that 4.6% of Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Computer... more Recent statistics indicate that 4.6% of Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information in 2011 were awarded to African American college students compared to 64.8% of Bachelor of Science degrees which were awarded to Caucasian students or 15.3% to Asian students enrolled in U.S. institutions [6]. Because of the low numbers of underrepresented minorities, specifically African Americans in Computer Science, the U.S. federal government, private industries and concerned American educators seek effective measures to increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science programs across the nation. One strategic approach is to leverage African American college students’ interest in technology (e.g. testing video games) that enables them to construct computing identities in the context of serving as a technical resource to their peers [2]. As a result, many voices representing different perspectives have begun to engage in a discussion of different approaches that stimulate African American students' interest in Computer Science and how to best propel that interest into educational and career choices that increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science [1 – 5].
Abstract: For more than a decade, scholars have identified culturally responsive pedagogy as a te... more Abstract: For more than a decade, scholars have identified culturally responsive pedagogy as a teaching method for improving the academic achievement of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Scholarly research on the intersection of culturally responsive teaching and educational technology, however, remains scant. The purpose of this literature review is to highlight research-based examples of culturally responsive applications and to provide recommendations for the design of technology-based learning environments.(Contains 5 ...
In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inqu... more In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down
and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new direct... more and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on “Layered Elaboration, ” a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. THE FOUNDATIONS OF LAYERED ELABORATION The concept for Layered Elaboration has its roots in storyboarding for interactive media [5], paper prototyping [8], and annotation tools [6]. Storyboards and drawings have been used as a method in participatory design research
When children learn how to program, they gain problemsolving skills useful to them all throughout... more When children learn how to program, they gain problemsolving skills useful to them all throughout life. How can we attract more children in K-8 to learn about programming and be excited about it? To answer this question, we worked with a group of children aged 7-12 as our design partners. By partnering with the children, we were able to discover approaches to the topic that might appeal to our target audience. Using the children’s input from one design partnering session, we designed a prototype tangible programming experience based upon the theme of cooking. The children evaluated this prototype and gave us additional design ideas in a second session. We plan to use the children’s design ideas to guide our future work.
As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and t... more As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. .Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team, including adults and children ages 7 -- 11 years old, used the technique to design both a game about history and a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation.
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 2021
Dialog with a social pedagogical robot or agent is a powerful way for kids to learn [1, 5] but ma... more Dialog with a social pedagogical robot or agent is a powerful way for kids to learn [1, 5] but may limit the formation of an agentic relationship with the technology [9]. One main purpose of conversational agents is to allow the user to have a natural interaction that reduces the need to learn artificial conventions [6], but dialog systems fall short with respect to failure recovery, vocabulary diversity, remembering conversational history, and other measures [2, 3]. Further, Hill et. al. [4] found that people adapt their model of communication to match a chatbot’s in the same way they do with a child or non-native speaker. Thus, users conversing with a pedagogical agent are implicitly trained to shape their behavior to suit the technology rather than shaping the technology. For young learners, particularly among populations that have been historically excluded from technology fields, this limits agency and reinforces marginalizing power structures [9]. This project combines a conversational agent with ideas of agentic engagement to help middle-school-aged children learn computational thinking. Agentic engagement is defined as students’ constructive contribution into the flow of instruction and includes behaviors such as expressing interests, preferences, and opinions. It has been positively correlated to learning performance and motivation [7, 8]. Combined with a culturally responsive curriculum (CRC), agentic engagement may help to foster an agentic relationship with technology. Our system encourages learners to engage agentically by using programming constructs to change the agent’s vocabulary, recognizing the intent behind a user utterance (an invocation), and defining the action the agent will take to respond to an invocation. Students use computational thinking concepts such as pattern recognition, abstraction, and decomposition to convert ideas into commands for the dialog system and to understand which of their ideas can’t be programmed with the technology as presented. They learn both to personalize the system today and to see the agent as a technosocial construct that they can shape in the future. Programming can be accomplished either using Google’s Blockly visual programming tool (https://developers.google.com/blockly) or through conversation with the agent itself. The agent is embodied as a robot character, so agent actions can be verbal, physical, or both. Through social dialog with the agent, learners reflect on how computational thinking is relevant to themselves and their communities as part of a CRC, building on the work of Stewart et. al. [10]. For example, learners may be asked to reflect on the relationship between greeting behaviors and identity. After designing a greeting interaction, learners program the dialog system to achieve the greeting. Then learners may be asked to imagine how they might hypothetically enhance the dialog system to make it even more capable of implementing their preferences. In parallel to the development of the dialog system and curriculum, we will also adapt Reeve’s agentic engagement instrument [7] for CRC. Our contributions will include this instrument, insights into the relationship between agentic engagement and an agentic relationship with technology, and insights into how a programmable dialog system impacts agentic engagement and learning computational thinking.
• Why? Programming allows children to explore creative topics and learn problem-solving skills. •... more • Why? Programming allows children to explore creative topics and learn problem-solving skills. • How? With tangible programming, children can easily work together and move around. • Design partnering [2] refers to a design process in which children actively help create the design. • The Kidsteam project is a vehicle for design partnering at the University of Maryland. • In our two 2-hour design sessions, there were 4 or more children (aged 7-12) and 6 or more adults. • To demonstrate our goals, we began by presenting a prototype for collaborative music programming made by Tarkan. • Musically-themed tangibles reappropriated as cooking objects • System supported iteration, deletion, and audio-tutorial • Wizard-of-oz execution • Sounds, Alice [1] simulation of cooking, and Java-like code as output
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011
Abstract In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Coopera... more Abstract In this video we describe Energy House. Energy House is a game designed with the Cooperative Inquiry Method through the Layered Elaboration technique. Children power items in a virtual house by jumping up and down. ... Keywords Co-design, children, participatory design, techniques, cooperative inquiry, games ... ACM Classification Keywords H5.0. Information interfaces and presentation: General. ... References [1] Walsh, G., Druin, A., Guha, ML, et al. Layered elaboration: a new technique for co-design with children. Proceedings of the ...
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, 2013
Recent statistics indicate that 4.6% of Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Computer... more Recent statistics indicate that 4.6% of Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information in 2011 were awarded to African American college students compared to 64.8% of Bachelor of Science degrees which were awarded to Caucasian students or 15.3% to Asian students enrolled in U.S. institutions [6]. Because of the low numbers of underrepresented minorities, specifically African Americans in Computer Science, the U.S. federal government, private industries and concerned American educators seek effective measures to increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science programs across the nation. One strategic approach is to leverage African American college students’ interest in technology (e.g. testing video games) that enables them to construct computing identities in the context of serving as a technical resource to their peers [2]. As a result, many voices representing different perspectives have begun to engage in a discussion of different approaches that stimulate African American students' interest in Computer Science and how to best propel that interest into educational and career choices that increase the number of African Americans in Computer Science [1 – 5].
Abstract: For more than a decade, scholars have identified culturally responsive pedagogy as a te... more Abstract: For more than a decade, scholars have identified culturally responsive pedagogy as a teaching method for improving the academic achievement of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Scholarly research on the intersection of culturally responsive teaching and educational technology, however, remains scant. The purpose of this literature review is to highlight research-based examples of culturally responsive applications and to provide recommendations for the design of technology-based learning environments.(Contains 5 ...
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