Children’s Participation in the Design of Smart Solutions: A Literature Review

Abstract

Smart solutions are widespread and diversified. Smart cities and smart objects are example of smart solutions. Their design usually follows certain patterns so that they can detect events and react accordingly. As future citizens, children are expected to interact with them in their daily lives. It is thus crucial to provide children with the tools for understanding, creating, and possibly programming them—in short, designing them. This paper presents a literature review of workshops involving children in designing smart solutions. The review coded a total of 25 papers that met the inclusion criteria. The discussion draws a research agenda using the workshops organized by the authors, the Roobopoli workshops for smart cities and the SNaP workshops for smart objects, as reference. Whereas smart cities and smart objects are usually addressed separately, this paper binds and compares them in order to investigate what, in different settings, enables children to be part of the design of smart solutions.

Experience with using BBC micro: bit in teaching

“…The development of smart objects is usually a task reserved for experts with a background in electronics and low-level programming. This situation has changed in recent years thanks to physical computing and microelectronic devices such as Arduino or Micro: bit (Pellegrino et al 2022). The study by Carlborg et al (2019) investigates which factors are important when using the micro: bit to teach computational thinking in Swedish schools.…”