From computational thinking to computational empowerment

Abstract

We propose computational empowerment as an approach and a Participatory Design response to challenges related to digitalization of society and the emerging need for digital literacy in K12 education. Our approach extends the current focus on computational thinking to include contextual, human-centred and societal challenges and impacts involved in students' creative and critical engagement with digital technology. Our research is based on the FabLab@School project, in which a PD approach to computational empowerment provided opportunities as well as further challenges for the complex agenda of digital technology in education. We argue that PD has the potential to drive a computational empowerment agenda in education by connecting political PD with contemporary visions for addressing a future digitalized labour market and society.

Interaction Order and Historical Body Shaping Children’s Making Projects—A Literature Review

“…Supporting each other. Our findings reveal a broad repertoire for successful interaction of children while working in groups [2][3][4]6,8,[13][14][15][16][17][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]30,37,40,42,45,49,[70][71][72][73][74][75]. Analyzing the projects considering collaborative engagement enabled us to identify some themes such as supportive peers, older/younger peers, successful collaboration and enhancing learning, idea sharing and discussion, friendly competition, collaborative decision making, equal group work contribution, breaking the traditional ice, grouping and role taking.…”

“…Interestingly, older and younger children were able to maintain a friendly competition as well [72]. The tendency of children in collaboratively making decisions [49], discussing and negotiating [21,37,45,49,70,72], sharing ideas [4,14,15,21,[25][26][27]30,39,42,[45][46][47][70][71][72]74], creating a shared understanding of the problem [2,49] and shaping groups [22][23][24]45] reveals important beneficial aspects of their collaborative engagements. Successfully overcoming the challenge of equal sharing of all the responsibilities is also reported among children having high Making literacy in hands [21].…”

“…Children having fun in their interactions as an influential factor in overcoming challenges is also pointed out [6]. Some roles such as 'inventor' [3], 'builder' [3], 'designer' [3,15], 'leader' [3,16,72], 'smart', 'maker' [26], 'creator'/ 'producer' [15], 'mentor' [40], 'tech-nerd' [4] and 'protagonist' [2], emerged among groups, and despite some reports on the challenges arising with these emerged roles, they mostly carried positive stances and led to group work contributions. Furthermore, the thriving of children, who performed weakly in a traditional classrooms as they become leaders or experts in non-traditional environments is identified [16,75].…”

“…The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been recognized recently [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Being a competent technology user is no longer seen as sufficient in the current technology-rich world and the literature emphasizes educating and empowering children to start innovating, designing, and building technology [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…Regarding education, the collaborative, self-directed, playful, and informal aspects of Making and Maker Movement are seen to benefit teachers and schoolchildren alike [7,12,14,17,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Making is not only tied to educational context, however, but it is seen as empowering, engaging, and inspiring children during their leisure time as well, in many different kinds of settings [2][3][4]6,7,14,15,20,25,29,30]. Making is actually an integral element of being a human: for human beings, it is natural to make tools for our own use as well as for the use of others.…”