Researching young children’s engagement and learning in makerspaces

Abstract

Vignette: Niklas engaging with virtual reality technologies Niklas (pseudonym), a 5-year-old boy, participates in a virtual reality workshop, one form of makerspace associated with FabLab Berlin. Niklas is interested in video games, computers and painting and there seems to be plenty of these materials and technologies around. Interestingly, there is also a toy, an Avakai wooden doll (made by the digital toy startup company Vaikai), with no gender-specific characteristics, which produces a great variety of sounds every time it is involved in some movement, aiming to communicate emotions (in Vaikai terms). Niklas is asked to create a world for that wooden doll, on or with cardboard and with a variety of other tools such as scissors, paint and pencils that are provided. Then he is also asked to create a similar environment for the doll using virtual reality tools. Other boys are present, including his older brother, who has just managed to paint in fine detail his own version of a virtual environment for the doll.Niklas can see the doll on the desk alongside the painting materials as well as the doll's virtual replication within the pre-designed virtual environment on a 2D laptop screen.For 3D vision he is required to wear an HTC VIVE headset, which is connected through cables to two controllers, one for each hand, as well as a set of sensors and a data processing unit. When he does that, he can no longer see anything off-screen.While Niklas tries the HTC VIVE headset, he steps on the (offline/off-screen) cable connecting it to the processing unit and almost falls on the floor. The facilitator -a woman in her 30s -quickly catches him so that he doesn't fall and moves the cable further away so that Niklas can focus on the virtual environment as it appears through the HTC VIVE headset. Then the facilitator invites Niklas to use the mouse, select a

Learning, digital technologies, and sociomaterial approaches: A critical reflection from the perspective of materialist dialectics

“…Perhaps such misgivings about systematically theorizing the developmental process arise from the opposition of sociomaterial approaches “to the proposition that culture, history, learning or development can be understood in terms of one single order” (Kontopodis & Kumpulainen, 2020, p. 18), and their emphasis on the contingency and unpredictability of empirical, everyday practices. For example, in the field of educational technologies, Sørensen (2009) has criticized “humanist” researchers for starting their analyses with rigid conceptual understandings of human learning and development, and only after considering how technology could be integrated in educational contexts for achieving the desired, prearranged aims (p. 7).…”