The roles of adult-participants in the back- and frontstage work of participatory design processes involving children

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

“…Facilitation style. (1) facilitator balanced scaffolding with openness (leaving room for open exploration in a way that children do not feel lost) [27], avoided from adopting the manner of a typical teacher [39], listened to children actively, helped children in developing their voice by understanding their background, engaged children in conversations and reflecting, triggered ideas by sharing their creative process [27], divided children into groups [38], avoided providing children with specific didactic guidance during ideation sessions [39], reviewed children's plans and guiding them [7], probed into the process by asking questions [7,40], and one study highlights the importance of expanding the network of facilitators, in order to connect with local mentors, and eventually to connect those mentors to the children [75], (2) youth mentors should act as agents who play active roles in both designing and leading activities [41] and children mentors avoided teaching directly [10], (3) instructors let children experiencing using the machines in the Fab Lab by themselves and helped them if needed [30], treated "activities as objectives for the students to achieve learning targets", assisted children when they asked for help and led the workshops' introductions [74], (4) mediators also contributed in providing emotional supports by managing in gaining trust of the children [38], youth workers acted in somewhat similar roles as proxies, mediating between children and researchers [38], and (5) helpers let children having full independency as far as possible [23], helped with logistics and also with the management of the classroom [37], looked at children's works [37], and were audience while children were presenting their products to them [20].…”

“…These actors have not been emphasized in the literature but they still are somehow engaged in and related to the activities. As we wanted to include a thorough report on all of the involved stakeholders, we present them here: The literature included mentions also of prison leadership, in charge of choosing the participants [17], undergraduate students, supervising the project with teen mentors [10], a lead designer in charge of developing initial technical sketches of the Maker activity [9], designers in charge of assisting children in the field testing sessions [39] and building the prototype of the activity [9], adult peers, engineering students, in charge of motivating children by presenting their ideas through an entrepreneurship pitch [25], youth workers in charge of assisting children and evaluating children's gains (since children used to talk to them regularly, youth workers were qualified enough to evaluate user's gain) [6], acting as motivators, motivating children as well as other colleagues in Making activities and caregivers, mitigating arguments among children, acting as playmates while engaging with children and taking the role of a friend when interacting with researchers [38,76], master students in charge of designing and creating the game [2], a multidisciplinary team in charge of designing the workshop [25], STEM educators in charge of ideating about workshop activities [46], university professors in charge of theoretical classes [30], a program supervisor in charge of tracking the teenager's progress [30] and "Staff as socio-cultural actors" [26], staff in charge of digital inclusion [72] and also in charge of planning and evaluating [15], and some other roles such as an artist game developer, PhD and master students with expertise in game development, and a project manager acting as instructors of the activities [74].…”

“…Helpers, facilitators', mentors' and tutors' occupations, educational backgrounds and expertise significantly shape children's Making projects. In the literature, if mentioned, these stakeholders are reported as being: (1) graduate students as main instructors [36,45], undergraduate students as assistants to the main instructor [45], college students as instructors [30], (2) undergraduate students as helpers [37], (3) design researcher as the main facilitator [7], (4) youth workers as facilitators, whose prior knowledge were beneficial in forming well-balanced groups [38], and (5) Fab Lab staff as tutors with "educational, technological and scientific background for planning, tutoring, evaluating", who had some experiences due to attending the previous workshops [15]. Another study reports the beneficial presence of different facilitators with different backgrounds and expertise; because if the facilitators did not know some certain things, they could ask other facilitators' helps [77].…”

“…The existing literature has already acknowledged that multiple stakeholders are involved in children's Making activities and the intergenerational aspects of making (see for example, [33][34][35]). The importance of teachers [3,7,9,14,16,17,20,24,36,37], facilitators [7,24,26,27,[38][39][40], mentors [5,9,10,26,41], and peers as influencing (helping or hindering) children's Making activities has already been pointed out in the literature. Likewise, studies have already indicated that children's skills, knowledge, and experiences may be highly significant in shaping how children engage in or are discouraged from Making activities [2,3,5,7,8,10,[13][14][15]17,20,21,24,26,27,30,35,36,40,[42][43]…”

Foregrounding backstage activities for engaging children in a FabLab for STEM education

“…Not only the lack of skills and experience to design for and use the technical infrastructure (hardware and software) is an important barrier for these users, but also the enormous variety of different technologies and tools in these spaces makes it difficult for them to experiment with [15,16]. For example, each 3D printer has its own properties, uses a specific technology and type of material influencing the size, strength and finishing of the printed object [8,17,18]. Furthermore, since most digital fabrication and software design tools are designed for expert users, non-expert users need to invest time and energy to learn how to use them [17,19,20].…”