Empowerment through design: engaging alternative high school students through the design, development and crafting of digitally-enhanced pets

• Authors: Maneksha DuMont
• Venue: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
• Year: 2012

Students in alternative school are not served by existing interventions, which often focus on remediation and rote learning. Tangible computational crafts, because of their emotional affordances and relationships to youth's known likes and activities, may be a way to engage struggling students in sophisticated learning through design projects. I aim to explore how underachieving youth enrolled in a rural alternative public high school for failing students use PicoBoard, an external logic board, to design, develop and craft their own digital pets. The study focuses on empowering novice students to be designers. Questions include how students engage in the process of finding and fixing errors, and whether the design project helps students develop a productive relationship to making mistakes and learning. Initial analyses suggest students without programming experience can design and develop a personal digital pet over the course of five weeks, that students take pride in their physical creations, divide work tasks according to perceived strengths, and learn important aspects of debugging and code remixing, even when not confident about their abilities.