Fun as a user gain in participatory design processes involving children

Interaction Order and Historical Body Shaping Children’s Making Projects—A Literature Review

“…Supporting each other. Our findings reveal a broad repertoire for successful interaction of children while working in groups [2][3][4]6,8,[13][14][15][16][17][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]30,37,40,42,45,49,[70][71][72][73][74][75]. Analyzing the projects considering collaborative engagement enabled us to identify some themes such as supportive peers, older/younger peers, successful collaboration and enhancing learning, idea sharing and discussion, friendly competition, collaborative decision making, equal group work contribution, breaking the traditional ice, grouping and role taking.…”

“…Successfully overcoming the challenge of equal sharing of all the responsibilities is also reported among children having high Making literacy in hands [21]. Children having fun in their interactions as an influential factor in overcoming challenges is also pointed out [6]. Some roles such as 'inventor' [3], 'builder' [3], 'designer' [3,15], 'leader' [3,16,72], 'smart', 'maker' [26], 'creator'/ 'producer' [15], 'mentor' [40], 'tech-nerd' [4] and 'protagonist' [2], emerged among groups, and despite some reports on the challenges arising with these emerged roles, they mostly carried positive stances and led to group work contributions.…”

“…Some studies not only considered in-group relations, but also left some room beyond the boundaries of private groups and dedicated to the promotion of interactions in higher levels such as the classroom level. For example, we interpret the enormous potential of inter-group relations in socializing due to the children's interaction with other groups [6,7,20,24,42,72], pranking other groups [73] and a public way of thinking [17], along with the pleasure that they experience consequently [6]. In addition, there is a report of utilizing multimodal interactions that consequently led to gaining richer experiences and also to the ability of reflecting on those experiences [74].…”

“…The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been recognized recently [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Being a competent technology user is no longer seen as sufficient in the current technology-rich world and the literature emphasizes educating and empowering children to start innovating, designing, and building technology [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…Regarding education, the collaborative, self-directed, playful, and informal aspects of Making and Maker Movement are seen to benefit teachers and schoolchildren alike [7,12,14,17,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Making is not only tied to educational context, however, but it is seen as empowering, engaging, and inspiring children during their leisure time as well, in many different kinds of settings [2][3][4]6,7,14,15,20,25,29,30]. Making is actually an integral element of being a human: for human beings, it is natural to make tools for our own use as well as for the use of others.…”