Learning through Participatory Design

Abstract

Children and teens have valuable insights to offer in the design of sociotechnical learning tools and environments. Prior work has identified a range of participatory design (PD) techniques that have been used successfully to engage youth of various ages in the design process. Less understood is how youth experience and learn from their engagement in specific PD techniques. Although recent work has begun to address this understudied area, it has focused primarily on children, not adolescents. In the current study, we document the learning opportunities experienced by a group of high school students who participated in a series of six PD sessions focusing on the design of a digital badge system that recognizes and rewards out-of-school science learning. We discuss how these learning opportunities, actualized through scaffolded reflection, contributed positively to the design of the digital badge system. This work advances knowledge of how and why engaging youth in PD can contribute to effective designs of sociotechnical learning systems.

A Badge, Not a Barrier

“…Most aligned with our current work, Druin and related KidsTeam researchers work from the concept of cooperative inquiry, in which children and teens are considered design partners and their expertise as youth is highly valued [24,25,42,77]. Teens can be a particularly challenging stakeholder group, as explored in prior work [3,5,31,67]. Teenagers are particularly aware of the power dynamics at play and thus may be more hesitant to express certain views, particularly in the presence of supervisory fgures [67].…”

“…Although they are a fairly new learning technology, digital badges have been used in a variety of diferent educational settings and with diferent age groups, ranging from elementary school classrooms to university courses and even professional development contexts [1,2,5,10,26,27,35,63,67,70]. Badges have also been part of discussions around gamifcation in education [54].…”

“…Initiatives such as Mozilla's Open Badges have worked to create a uniform standard for microcredentials, ostensibly to gain more acceptance and thus wider use [48]. Emerging work has also focused on the interoperability and extension of badges, as well as considering them a tool for learning rather than documentation of it [5,48,59]. Much of the work focusing on the actual implementation of digital badges covers initial designs and pilot studies.…”

“…Recent work by several scholars further explores the idea of whether children are equal design partners and how the relationships and roles between the children and adults can change over time [5,67,68,78,79]. In the current study, we engage in an ongoing PD process with youth stakeholders and their support staf to develop, implement, and refne a digital badge system that supports their learning in an after-school science interpretation program.…”

“…Although there is much interest in digital badges for learning, badges still face barriers in wider implementation and adoption [29,59]. Research on digital badging has shifted from initial implementations to deeper explorations of stakeholder viewpoints, motivations, and learning, as well as the badge design process itself [5,20,22,67,76]. There is still a great deal of skepticism surrounding digital badges, however, especially because of stakeholder doubts about their credibility and validity [21,22,29].…”