This pilot study analyzes the ways in which students' self-perceptions and roles impact how they interact within a STE(A)M maker workshop. It is centered on a case study of two teenage girls of color, who participated in a 1-week summer enrichment opportunity focused around digital and physical coding, making, arts and design in 2019. The students that participated were rising ninth graders enrolled in an inaugural Upward Bound summer extension program aimed at providing STEM learning opportunities for younger learners. We utilized interaction analysis to understand learners’ interactions and self-expressions as they worked separately with other students on some of the initial learning activities, and then later together as a team to design a project of their own ideation and negotiation. Findings support key changes in their self-perceptions as well as their own sense of identity around STEM and computing. We discuss these findings in light of relevant theories and frameworks in the field, and explore the potential for future directions with this work.

This article proposes and explores the kinds of computational thinking, creative practices, design activities, and inclusive learning opportunities provided to diverse high school youth when designing integrated systems through simultaneously physically and digitally responsive wearable games and systems. Previous work in this area, conducted by Richard, coined the term “bidirectionally responsive design” (BRD) to describe the design of dual-feedback systems using multiple digital and physical interfaces. BRD also emphasizes using simplified fabrication tools, media and coding platforms, and microcontrollers common in youth content creation communities and makerspaces. This study provides a framework to analyze computational concepts, practices, and perspectives that leverage an integrated systems and multimodal learning approach, such as BRD, adding to, building on, and integrating previous analytic approaches to looking at Scratch coding, media design, physical computing and e-textiles. Using a detailed case study of one team during one of the early workshop iterations, we conduct a multimodal analysis of bidirectionally responsive making activities and discuss the ways that they present novel understanding of integrating diverse interests and encouraging collaborative and distributed computational thinking. We further examine how BRD operationalizes and extends multimodal learning theory by adding tangible and integrative dimensions as additional modalities learners can leverage to facilitate meaning making, metacognition, and agency. We also discuss how designing integrated systems, as facilitated through BRD, provides an opportunity to engage in authentic practices around the design of complex systems.

Past efforts have demonstrated efficacy in broadening maker learning and participation by leveraging the material affordances and implicit presumptions associated with content creation tools. Past work has found that the purposeful integration of activities that blend multiple toolkits to create integrated designs [17;19;20] can both broaden the understanding of these affordances and demonstrate equitable and inclusive outcomes for adolescent youth. We illustrate early stage findings from an interaction analysis of the micro- and meso-level learning and collaborative processes that children and early adolescent learners engaged in throughout purposefully arranged multi-interface design projects to understand their agency and engagement over time and across activities.

Much attention has focused on the lack of diversity in access and participation in digital media available to youth. Far less attention has been paid to the diversity of youth creators and the content that is produced by youth. We examined the diversity of project creators, content, and comments in one of the largest youth programming sites called Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), with over 7 million registered members between ages 6-16, over 10 million posted projects and 16 million comments. We used keyword and webcrawler searches to reveal that only a small number of users (<.01%) self-disclosed their racial and ethnic identities. Case studies further illuminated how project designs and comments delved into race, provided cultural critique or addressed racial harassment. In the discussion, we address these blind spots of diversity in massive online DIY youth communities, discuss methodological limitations, and provide recommendations for future directions in supporting diversity.

Most research on game making has focused on designing digital games, as opposed to incorporating the potential for the designs of peripherals and controllers. In this paper, we illustrate how youth created wearable and physically interactive controllers by combining digital and tangible construction kits: Scratch, ModKit, the MaKey MaKey, and the Lilypad Arduino. In an eight-session workshop, 14-15-year old youth coded and created their own Scratch games and created wearable or electronic textile-based bidirectionally responsive game controllers using sensors to activate a response on the screen, through the physical artifact, or both interfaces. We analyzed students' design of game controllers, as well as post-workshop interviews, to understand how they articulated an understanding of bidirectionally responsive design and its affordances, focusing on a case study. In the discussion we address some of the insights and challenges presented through the workshop, and offer suggestions for future work.

We describe a workshop for high school youth to create interactive responsive and wearable interfaces for computing and gaming. The tools used in the workshop included tangible construction toolkits (the Lilypad Arduino and the MaKeyMaKey) and visual programming languages (Scratch, a coding and game design environment, and ModKit, a visual programming kit for Arduino devices and similar tangible kits) in addition to various conductive materials such as special fabric and aluminum foil. Past efforts with each of these toolkits have focused on interaction in one direction. This workshop focused on creating bidirectional tangible interfaces for gaming, meaning that interaction would happen on the screen and in the physical artifact or controller simultaneously. A further feature was the focus on creating wearable games. Thirteen students ages 13-15 years participated in the eight-session workshop. After learning the tools during the first four sessions, they started designing their own projects. Student teams created one bidirectional game with a textile interface, three inventive uni-directional wearable games and interfaces, and one half-completed design. Students felt that the workshop provided them with multiple entry points to computing, by capitalizing on different skill sets, and many expressed understanding bidirectional design, though they felt they needed more time. This poster will discuss the affordances and constraints of the workshop activities and toolkits, and how projects created relate to the students' understanding of tangible computing with different kinds of responsiveness. Finally, we offer recommendations for future workshops based on our own redesign of activities.

While coding competitions and hackathons have steadily increased in number, few women participate. Because these public events present viable opportunities to broaden participation in computing, we designed the theme to focus on "Wear & Care" and collaborative arrangements in a hardware hackathon, called StitchFest, in which 33 undergraduate and graduate students used the LilyPad Arduino to design wearables. Our analysis focused on the interviews conducted with eight female and seven male college participants to understand how targeted recruitment, thematic framing, space arrangements, kinds of materials and material distribution impacted participation and perception. We discuss what we learned about setting a thematic focus and fostering collaborative learning in coding competitions for broadening participation in computing.

In designing for engagement at a public multi-touch installation, we identified supporting multiple users and allowing for gradual discovery as challenges. In this paper, we present Worlds of Information, a multi-touch application featuring 3D Worlds, which provide access to different content. These 3D widgets gradually unfold and allow for temporal navigation of multimedia in parallel, while also providing a 2D plane where media can be shared. We report on a field trial at an exhibition using questionnaires and video ethnography. We studied engagement through questions adapted from Flow, Presence and Intrinsic Motivation questionnaires, which showed that users, overall, had a positive and social experience with the installation. The worlds effectively invited multiple users and provided for parallel interaction. While functionality was discovered gradually through social learning, the study demonstrates the challenges of designing multi-touch applications for walk-up-and-use displays.