Design-based learning (DBL) can contribute to students' designerly well-being when enabling them to engage with the world through their own personal values and beliefs.Reflecting on and incorporating personally meaningful human values in their designs might in turn provide an avenue to support students' collective agency to engage critically with technology.In this paper, we investigate how value-sensitive design (VSD)-based activities and tools can support middle school students in incorporating their values into design projects.We detail the development and implementation of a Design Values card set and values-focused learning activities in an exploratory case study with 24 grade 6/7 students (ages 11-13) over 18 sessions across six weeks.Findings illustrate students' value hierarchies and reasoning, the card set's role in supporting their design processes, and how their values shaped their final designs.We present implications for educational designers and educators along with future directions for research to support designerly well-being.

There has been an increasing focus on teaching youth about design ethics as part of technical literacy. Biowearables are an emerging technology in which devices worn on children's bodies are used to track, monitor and provide feedback about their biological processes. In this paper we describe an online critical making workshop designed to enable students in middle school years to develop technical literacy skills that include reflection on issues related to design ethics. We investigated if and how our workshop enabled eleven youth, aged 12-14, to reflect through processes of making their own biowearable, on potential negative impacts of biowearables on their developing senses of identity, agency, autonomy and authenticity. The workshop elements included facilitated activities using custom created biowearable-tangible kit and ethics cards. Through qualitative coding and thematic analysis of moments of reflection captured with video, chat, and design journals we gathered evidence of the feasibility of promoting critical making as a means to cultivate technical literacy in youth. Our findings suggest the potential of teaching design ethics through critical making workshops and reveal a range of ways that reflection on ethical issues can be supported during making. We interpret our empirical evidence to further explore how workshop elements supported, or failed to support, learning outcomes and generalize our interpretations to propose preliminary guidance about workshop mechanisms that might be used to support ethical reflection during making.

There are ethical concerns surrounding how youth interact with biowearable technology and the potential effects it has on their psychological and physiological health. We need to give youth the tools to critically reflect and explore ethical issues surrounding biowearables in order for them to make informed decisions about how they interact with them. To address this, we developed the Biotech Ethics cards as part of a critical making workshop. They are a set of design cards designed to scaffold critical reflection during a critical making workshop where youth prototype a biowearable from a kit. We focus this short paper on the requirements, initial design and revisions we made after studying card use in our workshop. We identified key design elements that are important in the cards and that may generalize to the design of other card sets meant to be integrated into a critical making process.

This paper presents PlushPal, a web-based design tool for children to make plush toys interactive with machine learning (ML). With PlushPal, children attach micro:bit hardware to stuffed animals, design custom gestures for their toy, and build gesture-recognition ML models to trigger their own sounds. We describe how, in the context of storytelling, PlushPal introduces core concepts in ML including data sampling and model evaluation. We conducted online workshops and in-person play sessions with 11 children between 8-14 years old building interactive stuffed animals with PlushPal. In these play sessions, we observed how children imagined bringing their toys to life using ML, as well as how children’s data literacy changed as a result of experimenting with sensors, data sampling, and building their own ML models. Our work contributes a novel design space for children to express their ideas using gesture, as well as a description of observed debugging practices, building on efforts to support children using ML to enhance creative play.