Abstract:

This presentation discusses the issues of sustainability of technology education and draws from the experiences of a practical example. Kids4Wearables was a two-year transdisciplinary project (2017-2019) with the aim of bringing together schools, research, and industry on the topic of wearable technologies. Simultaneously, the participating university installed COOL Lab, an “innovative teaching-learning lab for digital education & computational thinking”. In our contribution, we will describe how we make use of this coincidence to transfer the project idea and the gained knowledge in a newly established and highly relevant institution for digital education. The idea for Kids4Wearables is based on the vehicle theory according to which a topic of interest of young people is used as a vehicle to STEM education. This vehicle-topic should be of interest to a specific group, regardless their gender, age, social and cultural background, and at first sight it should be rather unrelated to STEM. For instance, creative topics such as music, TV-series or fashion allow low-threshold STEM education in schools, as they tie in with everyday life experience of pupils and work motivating when used to access more complex issues of science and technology. In Kids4Wearables fashion was used as a vehicle to access the innovative field of wearable technologies. Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), 129 pupils from five primary and secondary schools of a rural region in Upper Austria were able to learn about and invent their own wearables with the support of two university institutes, an artist, and a local company producing cellulose fibers. The project has been continuously evaluated by an external research institute, with one emphasis on the potential transfer of gained knowledge throughout and also after the project. During the two years of collaboration, digital education including computational thinking became obligatory in the syllabus of Austrian compulsory schooling. Schools should either provide digital education as a new subject or integrate it into existing subjects. However, teachers have been hardly prepared to implement digital education in their teaching. Consequently, the newly installed COOL Lab at Johannes Kepler University Linz was flooded with requests for workshops for pupils. Kids4Wearables proved to offer a valuable approach of how to implement digital education in existing subjects such as textile arts and technical handicraft. However, teachers recommended in interviews after the project that this implementation of digital education into existing school classes needs more than further education for teachers. It needs a support structure which offers knowledge, skills, access to the latest technology, but moreover coaches and trainers, where teachers can turn to with questions and who can be invited to accompany digital education activities in schools. This is what the COOL Lab can offer.

Thus, experiences and findings from Kids4Wearables are now successfully used to transfer the approach into a long-term program – not only for pupils but also for an accompanying further education for teachers.

Keywords:

STEM, computational thinking, digital literacy, wearable technology.