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.

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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.

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