Material Pets, Virtual Spaces, Isolated Designers: How Collaboration May Be Unintentionally Constrained in the Design of Tangible Computational Crafts Maneksha DuMont, Victor R. Lee Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Utah State University Logan, Utah 84322
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[email protected] 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 usercrafted 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.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education - Collaborative learning. General Terms Design.
Keywords Collaboration, tangible technologies, tangible computational crafts, youth's programming, PicoBoard, Scratch
1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, the advent of tangible computational crafts has begun to provide a way for young people to relate to computer programming and engineering through touch, feel and manipulation of a combination of everyday items and computational ones [6]. One reason for the excitement about these computational environments is in their potential to engage
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diverse populations in computer programming and design, especially girls and disaffected youth, by connecting to known activities, hobbies, interests and emotions [14, 2, 8]. The idea is that crafts can act as a cognitive bridge between affect and cognition, with affect facilitating the exploration of complex ideas [4]. By moving part or all of the computation into the physical world the design and computational processes are made more public and require less overhead. In principle, these technologies should be well suited for supporting collaboration. Multiple individuals can observe the actions of others, make suggestions, and take turns producing and implementing solutions. This collaborative potential is especially important, particularly in Constructionist environments (see Papert's [10] ideas about sharing within a Constructionist classroom, Kafai & Harel's [7] discussion of collaboration though the air, Bruckman's [1] community support within MOOSECrossing). This paper presents analysis of a new kind of tangible computational craft used as a learning environment, Digible Pets. The name Digible Pets is a fanciful reference to the technology's properties; they are digital, tangible and dig-able (esteemed and culturally relevant to youth,). Digible Pets are a computationally enhanced physical toy, designed and crafted by users out of materials such as fur, feathers, googly eyes, cork and pipe cleaners. An embedded logic board allows the pet to interact on the computer screen through a virtual persona. For instance, a furry cat might be designed and built so that when petted in the physical world, the motion depresses a button, and the cat then rolls over and purrs in her virtual space. Digible Pets are meant to piggyback on aspects of ZhuZhu Pets and Webkinz, recent and ubiquitous popular children's toys of similar spirit. The basic idea is that youth who do not necessarily relate to computers will feel capable and empowered to design when exposed to familiar craft activities and a familiar type of emotionally engrossing toy (as described by Turkle [17]). As part of a current study of alternative high school students engaged in designing Digible Pets, we have been examining the extent to which student teams are effective in crafting and developing computationally enhanced pets. For this study, we have been examining the nature of debugging that takes place with this physical and virtual technology, students' perceptions of themselves as "makers" after making a Digible Pet, and how students collaborated over the course of several weeks. The latter issue is the focus of this paper. As we will describe below, student collaboration was highly modularized. Rather than jointly build upon ideas and design plans with one another, the emphasis was on students taking distinct roles and responsibilities. This form of modular collaboration took place,
we believe, because of tendencies among students to treat their work as proprietary and a partitioning of work based on whether the design and creation activities required attention in the physical or virtual spaces.
2. THE DIGIBLE PETS TECHNOLOGY Digible Pets are user-crafted toys embedded with a PicoBoard [12], a pre-formatted electronic board that interfaces with the Scratch [15] programming language through USB (as shown in Figure 1.). Sensors, buttons, and sliders, can be made accessible through the designed pet's body and the pets are programmed so they can interact in personalized virtual spaces. Each pet has a physical body and a virtual persona. Digible Pets are similar to PicoCricket robotics [14] but emphasize designed virtual spaces in which the pets interact and live.
[10]. Four design teams consisting of 5 males and 4 females were studied (see Table 1. for details). Students were encouraged to cooperate and share. The room was laid out in open circle with portable laptops and space for students to walk around. Crafting materials were kept in a centralized location, meaning students had to travel to retrieve items. Workshop sessions concluded with roundtable discussions, where students were encouraged to describe interesting elements of their work. The facilitator referred students to one another with programming or design questions. Despite these collaborative structures, every multi-student group naturally distributed responsibilities according to perceived strengths. Each team had one programmer, one physical pet designer and if applicable, a third member who contributed predominantly when asked to assist with a specific task. Once the craft materials arrived, teams deviated from this structure only in circumstances when a student was absent. Table 1. Student Design Teams. Pet
Students
Sex
Role
Monkey
Rocky
M
Programmer
Ted
M
Assistant
Tegan
F
Tangible Pet Designer
Cat
F
Tangible Pet Designer
Tabitha
F
Programmer
Carlos
M
Programmer
Dino
M
Assistant
Maya
F
Tangible Pet Designer
Jamal
M
Programmer & Pet Designer
Unicorn
Figure 1. A prototype digital pet, "Cujo" (left) and a PicoBoard (right) embedded within Cujo.
3. THE DIGIBLE PETS PROJECT The first author ran a 5-week design project with 11 high school students (aged 15-18) enrolled in a public alternative school in the rural mountain west. The partnering alternative school focuses on teaching life skills and basic academics to a population of students who struggle academically as a result of substance abuse, learning disabilities, pregnancy, legal and/or family issues. Students enrolled in the school have failed many classes at the traditional high school (e.g., one junior mentioned having 17 courses to make up) and require intensive remediation in order to graduate with a high school diploma. The school meets students' needs through an abbreviated school day, small student to teacher ratio, and predominantly drill and practicebased learning. All students who, based on the observations of the first author or one of the alternative school teachers, showed interest in the project were invited to participate. Self-selected teams of one to three students designed and crafted their own Digible Pets. Teams created whimsical animal toys that interacted in virtual spaces based on ambient and user input. Designs were demonstrated at a design show for school personnel and invited guests. The resulting Digible Pets spoke, danced to popular music in their "rooms", reacted when fed objects, donned sunglasses in brightness, startled at loud noises and asked for permission to play based on interactions in the physical world. Analysis shows students take pride in their pets, learn how to remix computer code and attain debugging skills. However, during the project, students did little collaborating.
4. THE DISTRIBUTED STRUCTURE Student design teams worked at their own pace and in their own ways, in constructionist-inspired open-ended workshop sessions
Alien
Zebra
Students were asked about their work structure in open-ended post-interviews (See Table 2.); "I noticed that on some teams, some people did the programming stuff and some people did the hands-on crafty stuff. Do you think it was like that on your team?" Tabitha commented, "My partner did the hands-on stuff and I did the programming". Carlos echoed this idea, "They're better at making stuff with their hands and I'm better at the computer". Strict role distribution contrasts flexible role shifting styles of groups of youth making music videos [11]. However, distribution of work and collaboration are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Highly collaborative yet distributed working styles have been observed in classroom implementations of other computer-based technologies including a pair of students seamlessly thinking together using boxer [3]. Digible Pets are designed to further expand the collaborative character of computer-based technologies by supporting multiple designers at the same time and promoting users to build ideas together from past consumer experience with similar toys. As a result, we expected to observe a great deal of collaborative behavior. However, students within teams also isolated themselves from one another's ideas. For instance, when Maya (the crafter) asked her team member Carlos (the programmer) for advice on the design of their physical alien, "Wouldn't it be cool if he had so many eyes?" He responded, "I don't know. I don't care." Additionally, students rarely shared ideas between groups. Students took to their roles and worked independently, a structure that resulted in the students not helping with each other's work. This was so pronounced that we observed only 8 instances of teaching or explaining between members of different groups in 10 hours of workshop time.
5. MODULARITY: A WORKING STATE Several observed factors contributed to an isolated working style within and between groups. Table 2. Distributed Work-Related Interview Responses Interview Questions
Interview Responses
I noticed that on some teams, some people did the programming stuff and some people did the hands-on crafty stuff. Do you think it was like that on your team?
"Yeah. Tegan pretty much made the pet and me and Ted pretty much programmed." - Rocky "Yeah it was because I did the computer stuff and the other two members did the hands-on stuff." Carlos "They just kind of worked on that thing [computer] more. I made the monkey. Like he [Rocky or Ted] would help me cut something, but he didn't like make it or anything." - Tegan "My partner did the hands-on stuff and I had to do this (programming)." - Tabitha "Yeah, [Carlos] did more of the programming. And then I let Maya do the designing because I didn't know how to do that. Because I didn't like it." Dino
Why do you think you broke up the responsibility like that?
Another factor contributing to a distributed working style stemmed from students' wariness of others' capabilities. For instance, Tabitha said she programmed by herself because her partner is, "Kind of a slacker". Tegan claimed she did the tangible pet design alone because her partners would "Just mess it up." Lastly, in a final day of the project, Carlos exclaimed, "We did all the programming. She has to do something." The pervading atmosphere of distrust further exacerbated culturally relevant ideas about what is "fair" in the classroom. The idea of fairness contributed to students' predispositions to claim and delegate ownership over a specific segment of the work and ensured creative ideas were not shared.
5.2 A participatory, affective technology The observed distributed approach to design can be partly explained by characteristics of the participating population, but technology-specific factors also affected how students interacted. The physical portion of the design task promoted the cultivation of strong emotional connections and the combination of both virtual and physical design components encouraged more than one student to participate at once. Indeed, it appears the technology was perhaps too effective in promoting these ideals thereby further contributing to students' isolation.
"Because she would get mad at us if we tried touching her pet." - Rocky "Because they're better at making stuff with their hands and I'm better at the computer." - Carlos "Well, cause they're not really crafty and also they'd just mess it up because I had an idea in my head." -Tegan "She's kind of a slacker." -Tabitha
5.1 A proprietary, wary population The alternative high school was chosen for study specifically because students struggle with math and are not accustomed to learning through design projects. We hypothesized students would work together, especially when encouraged, in a creative environment that was not graded. Contrary to this assumption, students were highly proprietary about their ideas and distrusting of others' capabilities. In order to preserve an organic classroom ideal about fairness, students segmented the workload, effectively working alone within the larger learning environment. One factor affecting collaboration concerned students' beliefs that design ideas were proprietary. In several instances, students showed off aspects of their designs to other students. One student, Tegan, showed an idea to a facilitator/designer who commented, "Good idea!" Subsequently, Tegan quickly claimed ownership, "Don't take it." Similarly, when another designer expressed interest in having an outer space theme, Carlos shouted, "Get off my moon!" The general sentiment can be illustrated by Carlos, "Why don't you make it yourself, that's what this is about." Previous studies suggest collaboration may occur naturally with this technology design project. The idea of proprietary knowledge stands in stark contrast to the collaborative processes of students engaged in software design [7] and cooperative, code-sharing working style of computer clubhouse youth designing with a combination of computers and repurposed materials [9].
Figure 2. Tegan's monkey. One example of the emotional connection student designers developed to their physical pets involved Tegan, her partners, Ted and Rocky, and their pet monkey (See Figure 2.). Tegan did much of the initial programming for her team in the workshops prior to the craft materials arriving (this was done intentionally research suggests young people can get absorbed in cool crafting activities and sometimes ignore programming [2]). Tegan devoted all of the remaining workshops to creating a physical version of the monkey, letting her partners "Do whatever they wanted" with the virtual design. Tegan grew very attached to the physical pet. She showed her pet off to other students, teachers and the principal. The physical monkey design was Tegan's alone. Rocky commented, "She would get mad at us if we tried touching her pet". When Ted tried to assist Tegan with a specific bit of construction, she forcefully took the pet saying his contribution was, "Not perfect". She spent so much time attending to the monkey's appearance that on the final day she was forced to glue the PicoBoard onto its back in plain site because she didn't have time figure out how to embed it. When the project was over, Tegan asked to keep her monkey, even without the PicoBoard and Scratch program. The exhibit of intense attachment to a physical design is precisely what we hope will occur with Digible Pets, in light of what kinds of attachments have been documented previously in the tangible computational craft literature [13, 6]. Tegan was not intimidated
by the design task and was highly motivated, which, contrary to expectation, did not lead her to explore complex ideas about programming and design but instead effectively derailed her learning by shifting her attention away from the computational. But Tegan is not to blame; the technology itself facilitated students' distribution of design responsibilities. We intended the design project to be a coherent and intertwined activity/system, but here, the spaces where discreet manipulations (physical materials vs keyboard) could take place segregated the system. When asked why she chose to focus solely on the physical pet design instead of the virtual design, Tegan said, "Well, I wasn't going to do both at once". In this case, the technology did not limit the openness of the activity, the human, who cannot interact simultaneously with multiple parts of the system, did.
6. CONCLUSION Although we might expect students would and should collaborate when designing with tangible computational crafts, the observed students instead had a distributed and isolated working style. Reasons for a segregated structure include a proprietary, distrusting culture and unintended consequences of the affective and social qualities of the tool. In this case, designing with a tangible computational craft was an isolating endeavor; a constraint to the kind of learning that can result from sharing and building ideas. Although isolation is an unexpected outcome, there is solace in Stevens' [16] explanation that distribution of labor in classrooms has no inherent connotation, but is a natural occurrence to be investigated and understood.
7. FUTURE WORK Using Digible Pets for learning is still in a very exploratory stage. Ongoing analysis of this study suggests students do learn, program and design, but they could perhaps do better. Given preliminary analyses, the challenge becomes how to enable collaboration within and between tangible computational craft design groups. One idea is to change the learning configuration. Students could work on independent designs side-by-side, a collaborative arrangement used in previous computer-based student design projects [7]. Also, Digible Pets plan to evolve to include ways for students to collaborate with each other and interact with one another's pets in the online space (like Craftopolis [8]). Students may feel more comfortable collaborating in this way, which more closely mimics their cultural activity outside of school. Thus far, the Digible Pets study is a brief exploration of a wide, exciting future of understanding how to best promote learning with diverse populations and computationally enhanced crafts.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to thank the students, teachers and administrators at Wallingford Alternative High School.
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