View Public Project: e-craft Digital Fabrication and Maker Movement in Education: Making Computer-supported Artefacts from Scratch [PR124803]

Institutionen

• Zentrum für Soziale Innovation (Wien)

Personen

• Voigt, Christian

The eCraft2Learn project will research, design, pilot and validate an ecosystem based on digital fabrication and making technologies for creating computer-supported artefacts. The project aims at reinforcing personalised learning and teaching in science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) education and to assist the development of 21st century skills that promote inclusion and employability for youth in the EU. The eCraft2Learn ecosystem will support both formal and informal learning by providing the appropriate digital fabrication, making technologies, and programming tools. It will also incorporate mechanisms for personalised and adaptive learning.

The design and implementation of the eCraft2Learn ecosystem will be grounded on adaptations of usercentred design (UCD) and scenario-based design principles. We will use an iterative methodology which
combines analysis and concept generation, design and technologies benchmarking, technology implementation and prototyping, and learning activities design and evaluation into continuous enriching and gradual actions leading to the widespread adoption and exploitation of the eCraft2Learn ecosystem.

It is essential to take care of building and sharing a vision among the project team from the very beginning of the design and implementation processes. Using a pool of flexible user-centred/scenario-based design
techniques during each stage of eCraft2Learn ecosystem development will enable the multidisciplinary project team to explore, investigate and realise the project concept. The concept will be defined and
incrementally built and consolidated while design and analysis are running. The effort dedicated to the consolidate the concept is compensated by better communication among the different experts involved in
the team and more effective results produced by the directions of the project leader, among other practical effects. The concept plays a fundamental role to maintain the focus of the project and to re-orient design choices whenever the contributions coming from the different disciplines diverge from each other. Each stage of the developmental process of the eCraft2Learn ecosystem is described below.
Analysis – planning pedagogical and technical conceptualisation.
This stage of the project development involves the research analysis tasks towards three directions:
determining the innovation conditions of the diverse stakeholders involved (WP2, T2.1), elaborating a personalised, craft- and project-based learning pedagogy (WP3, T3.1) and identifying emerging
technologies that facilitates the ideas underpinning adaptive and personalised learning (WP4, T4.1 and T4.2). A suitable scenario-based design technique to use during this stage is the design fictions or
speculative design. This is a method of critical design that uses fictional and narrative scenarios to envision, explain and raise questions about possible futures for design and society. Role playing, a
technique in which the designers experience a shift of perspective (in order to consider the viewpoint of the end-users) as well as participatory design involving the end-users (e.g., coaches and students) from
the beginning of the process will render the technical and pedagogical design progression agile and realistically adjusted to the end-users needs. Brainstorming techniques for the development of creative ideas will also be employed. Since brainstorming is based on the free association of ideas in a group setting where the participants withhold criticism and openly encourage unconventional thinking it will probe useful during participatory design sections with the stakeholders. The technique uses different means for the description of concepts, problems, etc. As starting point, the conceptual educational case
scenarios detailed in Sect 1.2.a will be used.

Design and implementation
The eCraft2Learn ecosystem convenes over a period of iterative design and implementation stage. This stage includes designers and researchers with different technological expertise (i.e. DIY electronics, 3D
modelling, 3D printing, robotics, visual programming and more), pedagogy experts and curriculum development partners. During the design and implementation stage the alignment between the pedagogical framework (WP3, all tasks) and the technical environment (WP4, T4.3-T4.5) will take place. Experience prototyping and interactive prototyping techniques will be used to support the development
and exploration of different design concept through software prototypes. Interactive prototypes can be developed throughout the development schedule and can be quickly replaced or changed in line with
design feedback.

Pilots and evaluation
This stage includes the small scale pilot studies of eCraft2Learn learning ecosystem in educational contexts (formal and informal). The impact of the eCraft2Learn learning intervention on the learners will
be measured to allow the validation of the claims that eCraft2Learn ecosystem can foster the development of 21st century skills for youth (WP2, T2.3 and WP5). Also, validation of the usefulness of the
eCraft2Learn technical environment as a supporting backbone to the craft- and project-based learning pedagogy will be performed (WP3, T3.2 and WP4, T4.5). Several techniques will be deployed during the
pilots an evaluation stage including:

Cultural probes. Cultural probes are means to exploring the ludic aspects of everyday life contexts and articulate alternative motives for the use of technology. Cultural probes stimulate the active
participation of users in the collection of materials about themselves and to produce imaginative responses. This will facilitate the idealisation stage of the pedagogical framework. The technique is supported by the materials aesthetically crafted to express the interests of designers, to motivate, and show respect in the users

Observations. Participants’ observation is a traditional method of sociology and cultural anthropology. It involves the study of people performing activities and interacting in complex social settings in order to obtain a qualitative understanding of these interactions. A significant problem in system design is the system’s failure to provide or support features that are central to its real world use. The goal of observations within the evaluation stage is to identify end-users practices, problems and possibilities for improvement within the eCraft2Learn ecosystem.

Storytelling. Stories are description of learning educating activities in a specific cultural and physical context. They are used in design to capture aspects of the activities that are difficult to reveal with other techniques. The storytelling process will facilitate the project description and personal feedback within the eCraft2Learn ecosystem. This will be directly linked to the personal involvement and
emotional details shown in each project that the students take part in during the piloting. A story is a description from the teller’s point of view, a story, then, is an account of the past events rich in details
that communicates a personal meaning and an emotional involvement (such as satisfaction, frustration, irony).

Interviews. A simple way to interview users and experts is the use of semi-structured interview containing a set of pre-defined question. The structure is flexible, the person is free to elaborate on
each topic and the interviewer is supported in the exploration of relevant topics. The technique is extremely effective since it is fast and cheap, focuses on relevant aspects of the design, and allows
collecting details about those aspect that are difficult to understand with the direct observation of the activity.

Learning Diaries. This research tool is commonly used for gathering data during the activity evaluation. Its effectiveness is related to the fact that it does not require participants to spend a great effort in recollecting past experiences. Diaries can also be used in combination with various levels of low-fidelity prototype that simulate the intended usage of a given system so to encourage participants to think about the prototypes and make their feeling concrete.

Ergebnisse werden unter http://www.project.ecraft2learn.eu/ öffentlich zur Verfügung gestellt.

• Ergebnisse

• Lehren und Lernen (Prozesse und Methoden) / Lernen / computergestütztes Lernen
• Verhalten und Persönlichkeit / Kompetenz / digitale Kompetenz
• Schulen und andere Bildungseinrichtungen / Ausstattung / IKT-Ausstattung / Unterrichtsmaterial
• Schulen und andere Bildungseinrichtungen / Ausstattung / Unterrichtsmaterial
• Lehren und Lernen (Prozesse und Methoden) / Unterricht / Unterrichtsmaterial
• Information, Kommunikation, Statistik / IKT-Ausstattung / Unterrichtsmaterial
• Lehren und Lernen (Prozesse und Methoden) / Lernprozess / Lernstrategie
• Lehren und Lernen (Prozesse und Methoden) / Lernprozess / Lernumfeld