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

让孩子参与创意设计和STEM体验至关重要，即使在很小的时候也是如此。Lilypad等可穿戴建筑工具有望吸引代表性不足的群体加入STEM，扩大对计算的认知，并赋予用户创造个人有意义的计算设计的能力。然而，这些工具设置了很高的入门门槛，特别是对年幼的孩子来说，因为它们需要一些编程知识，对电子和电路的理解，以及缝纫等手工技能。这项研究将调查新的界面、技术和工具，使5-10岁的儿童能够编程、构建和使用他们自己的交互式可穿戴设备。虽然目标年龄范围是雄心勃勃的，跨越了认知和运动技能以及教育经历的差异，但工作的重点是更好地了解如何增加可穿戴设计的可接近性，甚至对年幼的孩子来说，并指导用户创建越来越复杂的设计，以匹配他们的能力水平。项目成果将为未来的儿童数字物理工具包提供信息，促进我们对如何让儿童参与计算思维和构建的理解，并为更广泛的儿童可穿戴计算和交互设计领域做出贡献。虽然这项研究的直接目标群体是幼儿，但这些方法将对一般的创客工具产生更广泛的影响。PI将与他的合作伙伴一起举办“制作”工作坊并进行案例研究，这将为参与设计和STEM提供新的机会。这些案例研究也将允许孩子们公开展示他们的设计。PI将开源他的作品，创建并上传到YouTube上，并维护一个描述工作的公共网站。这项研究将探索新的工具、技术和界面，以克服目前限制更广泛参与可穿戴设备创造的关键挑战，特别是对幼儿的挑战，并在实验室和实地研究的混合中评估新的适合发展的方法。该项目将为可穿戴设计引入分层混合的有形图形方法，其中孩子们通过使用有形的即插即用模块来构建和编程他们的可穿戴产品。对于年龄较大的儿童（8-10岁），触摸屏界面将允许通过可视化编程、调试和基于传感器的演示编程来创建越来越复杂的设计。这项实证研究将推动幼儿编程方法和创造性设计工具的发展，并将首次评估幼儿如何构建可穿戴设备，包括他们想要构建什么，他们如何处理构建过程，他们如何在日常生活中使用自己的设计，以及与工程和计算思维相关的技能发展。

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.