CAREER: A Tangible-Graphical Approach to Engage Young Children in Wearable Design

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Involving children in creative design and STEM experiences is critically important, even at an early age. Wearable construction toolkits such as Lilypad have shown promise in attracting underrepresented groups to STEM, expanding perceptions of computing, and empowering users to create personally meaningful computational designs. These tools, however, set a high bar to entry, especially for young children, by requiring some programming, an understanding of electronics and circuits, and manual skills like sewing. This research will investigate new interfaces, techniques, and tools to enable children ages 5-10 to program, build, and use their own interactive wearables. While the target age range is ambitious, spanning differences in cognitive and motor skills as well as educational experiences, a key focus of the work is to better understand how to increase the approachability of wearable design, even for young children, and to scaffold users into creating increasingly complex designs to match their ability level. Project outcomes will inform future digital-physical kits for children, advance our understanding of how to engage children in computational thinking and construction, and contribute to the areas of wearable computing and interaction design for children more broadly. While the immediate target community of this research is young children, the methods will have broader implications for maker tools in general. Working with his partners, the PI will conduct "making" workshops and run case studies which will provide new opportunities for engagement in design and STEM. These case studies will also allow children to showcase their designs publicly. The PI will open source his artifacts, create and upload generally accessible videos to YouTube, and maintain a public website describing the work. This research will explore new tools, techniques, and interfaces for overcoming key challenges that currently limit broader participation in wearable creation, particularly with young children, and evaluate new developmentally-appropriate approaches in a mixture of lab and field studies. The project will introduce a tiered hybrid tangible-graphical approach to wearable design, wherein children build and program their wearable creations physically by using tangible plug-and-play modules. For older children (ages 8-10), touchscreen interfaces will allow the creation of increasingly sophisticated designs through visual programming, debugging, and sensor-based programming by demonstration. This empirical research will advance the growing area of programming approaches and creative design tools for young children, and will provide the first assessments of how young children build wearables, including what they want to build, how they approach the building process, how they use their own designs in their everyday lives, and skill development related to engineering and computational thinking.