Abstract
Although there is a growing interest in engaging children in the design of interactive learning technology, young learners are mostly asked to co-design features and apps that lie on the peripheral of the learning processes, such as websites, e-portfolios or assessment applications. In this article, we will try to investigate whether experienced elementary students can offer useful insights about the design of the content of an educational app, its learning representations and its learning interactions. For this purpose, we have developed a collaborative board design game called We!Design!Fractions, for designing apps about fractions. Fractions constitute a demanding learning domain in elementary education and, hence, an appropriate testbed for our research aims. The design game consists of a game board, cards, dice and pawns and it was developed by exploiting theories about board games, collaborative design games and idea generation. A study was conducted with 27 6th grade students who participated in 7 design sessions of three to four students. Each session lasted for about 3 h. By playing the game, students proposed a total of 199 ideas about the educational app that were later evaluated by themselves regarding their learning usefulness and their innovation. Students claimed that the board game stimulated their idea generation process, offered an enjoyable experience and that their proposals could enable designers develop an educational application about fractions that would fulfil better their needs and preferences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Druin, A.: Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington (2009)
Bekker, M., Beusmans, J., Keyson, D., Lloyd, P.: KidReporter: a user requirements gathering technique for designing with children. Interact. Comput. 15(2), 187–202 (2003)
Dindler, C., Eriksson, E., Iversen, O.S., Lykke-Olesen, A., Ludvigsen, M.: Mission from Mars: a method for exploring user requirements for children in a narrative space. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 40–47. ACM (2005)
Read, J.C., Gregory, P., MacFarlane, S., McManus, B., Gray, P., Patel, R.: An investigation of participatory design with children-informant, balanced and facilitated design. In: Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children International Workshop, pp. 53–64. Shaker, Maastricht (2002)
Bell, A., Davis, K.: Learning through participatory design: designing digital badges for and with teens. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 218–229. ACM (2016)
Culén, A.L., Bratteteig, T., Pandey, S., Srivastava, S.: The Child-to-Child (C2C) method: participatory design for, with and by children in a children’s museum. IADIS Int. J. WWW/Internet 11(2), 92–113 (2013)
Roussou, M., Kavalieratou, E., Doulgeridis, M.: Children designers in the museum: applying participatory design for the development of an art education program. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 77–80. ACM (2007)
Iversen, O.S., Smith, R.C.: Scandinavian participatory design: dialogic curation with teenagers. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp. 106–115. ACM (2012)
Yarosh, S., Schueller, S.M.: “Happiness inventors”: informing positive computing technologies through participatory design with children. J. Med. Internet Res. 19(1), e14 (2017)
Jordan, N.C., et al.: Developmental predictors of fraction concepts and procedures. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 116(1), 45–58 (2013)
Vamvakoussi, X., Vosniadou, S.: How many decimals are there between two fractions? Aspects of secondary school students’ understanding of rational numbers and their notation. Cogn. Instr. 28(2), 181–209 (2010)
Morgan, C., Mariotti, M.A., Maffei, L.: Representation in computational environments: epistemological and social distance. Int. J. Comput. Math. Learn. 14(3), 241–263 (2009)
Rau, M.A., Aleven, V., Rummel, N., Pardos, Z.: How should intelligent tutoring systems sequence multiple graphical representations of fractions? A multi-methods study. Int. J. Artif. Intell. Educ. 24(2), 125–161 (2014)
Triantafyllakos, G., Palaigeorgiou, G., Tsoukalas, I.A.: Designing educational software with students through collaborative design games: the We!Design&Play framework. Comput. Educ. 56(1), 227–242 (2011)
Nijstad, B.A., Stroebe, W.: How the group affects the mind: a cognitive model of idea generation in groups. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 10(3), 186–213 (2006)
Liikkanen, L., Perttula, M.: Contextual cueing and verbal stimuli in design idea generation. In: Proceeding of the Design Computing and Cognition 2006, pp. 619–631 (2006)
Paulus, P.B., Yang, H.C.: Idea generation in groups: a basis for creativity in organizations. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 82(1), 76–87 (2000)
Shih, P.C., Nguyen, D.H., Hirano, S.H., Redmiles, D.F., Hayes, G.R.: GroupMind: supporting idea generation through a collaborative mind-mapping tool. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 139–148. ACM (2009)
Warr, A., O’Neill, E.: Understanding design as a social creative process. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Creativity & Cognition, pp. 118–127. ACM, April 2005
Brandt, E., Messeter, J., Binder, T.: Formatting design dialogues–games and participation. Co-Design 4(1), 51–64 (2008)
Pedersen, J., Buur, J.: Games and movies: towards innovative co-design with users. In: Scrivener, S.A.R., Ball, L.J., Woodcock, A. (eds.) Collaborative Design, pp. 93–100. Springer, London (2000)
Iversen, O.S., Buur, J.: Design is a game: developing design competence in a game setting. In: Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, pp. 22–28 (2002)
Kultima, A., Niemelä, J., Paavilainen, J., Saarenpää, H.: Designing game idea generation games. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share, pp. 137–144. ACM (2008)
Triantafyllakos, G., Palaigeorgiou, G., Tsoukalas, I.A.: Design alter egos: constructing and employing fictional characters in collaborative design sessions. In: Proceedings of the 23rd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Celebrating People and Technology, pp. 20–28. British Computer Society (2009)
Grossman, S., Catlin, K.: SuperHeroes. In: 31st Annual Creative Problem Solving Institute, Buffalo, NY. The Creative Education Foundation (1985)
Kowaltowski, D.C., Bianchi, G., De Paiva, V.T.: Methods that may stimulate creativity and their use in architectural design education. Int. J. Technol. Des. Educ. 20(4), 453–476 (2010)
Silver, M.: Exploring Interface Design. Cengage Learning, Boston (2013)
Kensing, F., Madsen, K.H.: Generating visions: future workshops and metaphorical design, pp. 155–168. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc (1992)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Palaigeorgiou, G., Sidiropoulou, V. (2021). Can Elementary Students Co-design the Learning Content of Educational Apps: The We!Design!Fractions Participatory Design Approach. In: Auer, M.E., Tsiatsos, T. (eds) Internet of Things, Infrastructures and Mobile Applications. IMCL 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1192. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49932-7_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49932-7_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49931-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49932-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)