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Material pets, virtual spaces, isolated designers: how collaboration may be unintentionally constrained in the design of tangible computational crafts

Published: 12 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Novel computational technologies that incorporate aspects of youth's activities, toys and culture with more traditional computer-based technology have the potential to change the landscape of youth participation in computer programming and design. This paper describes an effort to combine and centralize these aspects and technologies into an activity called "Digible Pets". The Digible Pets project was developed to be part user-crafted touchable animal and part virtual digital pet. Crafted physical pets are programmed to interact within a virtual space through a PicoBoard. In this project, academically struggling students in an alternative school successfully designed, crafted and developed a Digible Pet over the course of five weeks. While the project was designed to encourage collaboration, students actually did little idea sharing or building within or between design groups. This paper explores how collaboration, and its potential to facilitate learning, was unintentionally constrained by both students' individual dispositions and the technology interfaces.

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  • (2024)The Effect of Regular and Innovative Control Devices on Cultivating Creativity in a Game Creating Course in Primary SchoolEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1408083314:8(833)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Review of Cultural Impact on Children’s Play Perception and Digital GamesHCI International 2024 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-76812-5_23(341-351)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024
  • (2016)Inclusive InteractivesProceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children10.1145/2930674.2930685(89-100)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2016

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    IDC '12: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
    June 2012
    399 pages
    ISBN:9781450310079
    DOI:10.1145/2307096
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 June 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. collaboration
    2. picoboard
    3. scratch
    4. tangible computational crafts
    5. tangible technologies
    6. youth's programming

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    View all
    • (2024)The Effect of Regular and Innovative Control Devices on Cultivating Creativity in a Game Creating Course in Primary SchoolEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1408083314:8(833)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2024
    • (2024)A Review of Cultural Impact on Children’s Play Perception and Digital GamesHCI International 2024 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-76812-5_23(341-351)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024
    • (2016)Inclusive InteractivesProceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children10.1145/2930674.2930685(89-100)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2016

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