Using Robotics and 3D Printing to Introduce Youth to Computer Science and Electromechanical Engineering

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

“…Therefore, for each actor, we organize our findings in two major categories of (1) engagements and (2) challenges, and for each category, we dig deeper and introduce different themes in more detail. [25,75]. Children were involved in a self-organizing manner of their work and their time [7].…”

“…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.…”

“…Interestingly, older and younger children were able to maintain a friendly competition as well [72]. The tendency of children in collaboratively making decisions [49], discussing and negotiating [21,37,45,49,70,72], sharing ideas [4,14,15,21,[25][26][27]30,39,42,[45][46][47][70][71][72]74], creating a shared understanding of the problem [2,49] and shaping groups [22][23][24]45] reveals important beneficial aspects of their collaborative engagements. Successfully overcoming the challenge of equal sharing of all the responsibilities is also reported among children having high Making literacy in hands [21].…”

“…Although creativity is embedded in the heart of digital fabrication and Making process, not much affirmative discussions about creativity in relation to the peer interactions could be found in this review. In [7,14,20,25,74] the subject of the engagements of the children in a collaborative creative challenge is brought up.…”

“…There are even studies arguing for the importance of 'maker literacies', for example, highlighting how Making related skills have become so central in the current world that they are comparable to other literacy skills, such as reading and writing, and for example, 'media literacy' [18,19]. 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].…”