Layered elaboration

Abstract

As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. .Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team, including adults and children ages 7 -11 years old, used the technique to design both a game about history and a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation.

Teaching and Developing Social and Emotional Skills with Technology

“…A large number of systematic reviews of SEL literature already exist, mainly with the focus on meta-analyses of measurable effects and long-term impacts of the curricula (e.g., Adi et al [2007a], Durlak et al [2011], Elbertson et al [2009], Greenberg [2010, Payton et al [2008], and Weare and Nind [2011]). We build on these and approach the topic with a complementary HCI perspective in mind, aiming to identify the SEL challenges that could be addressed by technology.…”

“…Third, recent academic reviews have analysed the evidence base for the effectiveness of SEL programs and find measurable and significant positive effects of SEL in randomised trials, for example, Durlak et al [2011], Greenberg [2010, and Weare and Nind [2011]. In particular, the social and emotional skills curricula lead to improvements in academic performance and the taught skills areas.…”

“…Social and emotional skills refer to a variety of skills that are crucial for our everyday life and healthy development [Adi et al 2007a;Damon and Eisenberg 2006;Weare and Nind 2011], including skills such as those related to emotional intelligence, interpersonal, and communication skills, but also skills such as mindfulness, self-control, and empathy. Understanding how such social and emotional skills are learned, and how this learning process can be supported by technology, is an emerging area of research within HCI (cf.…”

“…In particular, SEL in school education draws on 20+ years of history in teaching social and emotional skills through carefully designed, evidence-based programs that support a broad set of social and emotional skills needed for adult life. Moreover, the wide-scale deployments of these programs 1 build on established methodologies to evaluate the effect of such curricula on learners' behaviour, with data showing that such skills are teachable and that the programs can lead to measurable improvements [Durlak et al 2011;Weare and Nind 2011]. However to date, very little technology-if any at all-is used in the current curricula.…”

Co-designing with children a collaborative augmented reality book based on a primary school textbook

“…The second is 'Sticky Noting' [13] which is a cooperative inquiry technique for critiquing a prototype with children, and will be called (CI critiquing) 2 in this paper. 'Layered elaboration' technique was also used as a generative method to support the CI critiquing [14].…”