Engaging children in the smart city: a participatory design workshop

Abstract

Nowadays, smart city is a term recurring in many political discourses and in literature as smart cities provide innovative solutions to solve urban issues. However, this concept and its implications remain obscure to the larger public. In order to help younger citizens understand what lies behind the smart city, we developed a workshop aiming at vulgarizing the concept of smart city in all its complexity. We present here the results of the first in-school session of the workshop. It shows promising results on the engagement of children as well as an evolution in their understanding of the smart city.

Introducing the Smart City to Children with a Tangible Interaction Table

“…The search for improvement leads started by an analysis of several city construction games that incorporate smart city related issues such as environment. The researchers who developed the original activity [22] explain that they have developed it by analyzing the literature. Therefore, in order to search for leads in a complementary way, we stepped back from the literature and we made a selection of games (including both board and video games) using non-academic search engines.…”

“…While there is a need to introduce the concept of smart city and its participative implications to citizens and especially children, this perspective is to the best of our knowledge missing in the literature. To address this issue, we have developed an education activity to introduce the smart city concept and citizen participation to 12-14year-old children [22]. It takes the form of a workshop given over two separate sessions, each lasting 100 minutes.…”

“…The evaluation of this activity showed success in improving children's understanding of the concept as well as interest for participation and mature discussions around it [22]. However, one major issue that arose is the lack of depth of the debates around the city model, which is limited by its low interactivity.…”

Report from the 1st Int. Workshop on Education through Advanced Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (EASEAI '19)

“…Simonofski et al [8] opened the first session of the workshop, dedicated to programming education and literacy awareness, by presenting their design of a workshop to introduce smartcities to schoolkids. This design includes the development of a technical solution as an introduction to programming using block-based languages and showed encouraging results during an initial evaluation in a classroom with 21 children.…”

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

“…While smart solutions are frequently mentioned in the news and political discourses [2], what they are and how they are designed are unclear for people without a technical background [2,8]. Recent research recognises the need to enable citizens to assume an active role in their design, e.g., [9,10].…”