Abstract:

Educators increasingly integrate sustainability topics and digital design activities into their teaching, yet they often lack structured tools to assess the student-created prototypes that emerge from these formats. Especially in short workshop settings, prototypes are complex dense outcomes that simultaneously express students’ understanding of sustainability, user needs, and digital solution concepts. Their integration into the curricula requires a multidisciplinary understanding of its aspects that needs to allow for a fair and value-adding evaluation. To offer such fair and pedagogically meaningful evaluation, teaching staff need an assessment approach that goes beyond usability and in addition captures conceptual quality, sustainability competences, and educational relevance.

Sustainability education, while gaining increasing attention among educators and program managers, relies on a heterogeneous mix of methods. Co-creative, design-based formats are particularly valuable, as they help learners integrate new knowledge and retain it through active making and reflection. By engaging in both the creation and evaluation of prototypes, learners develop meta-awareness of how design choices shape the sustainability characteristics of digital products, a process that resonates with transformative learning perspectives.

This paper presents the development of a multidimensional prototype assessment framework designed for sustainability-focused digital education workshops (PAFSDEW). The framework builds on experiences from the workshop “Prototyping Sustainability – Designing Sustainable IT”, in which secondary school students design a smartphone, an app, or website as paper prototypes according to provided persona requirements, while addressing environmental, social, and economic impacts of digital technologies. The framework integrates perspectives from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and educational design, into four complementary dimensions: usability, sustainability reflection, conceptual clarity, and educational relevance.

The framework is presented in two steps: a generic theoretical structure linking literature-based perspectives to assessment dimensions, and a planned implementation specifying assessment questions, rating scale, and artifact types for the workshop context. This two-step design ensures both transferability to other educational settings and relevance to the specific case study. The paper contributes to the field of sustainability education by offering a structured, literature- and evidence-based approach to assessing prototypes as substantiation of learning outcomes, sustainability competences, and user-centered design skills. Planned analysis of the existing dataset of student-created artifacts will further validate the framework and provide insights for educators and researchers aiming to integrate participatory, prototype-driven learning into sustainability-focused curricula.

Keywords:

Sustainability education, prototype assessment, participatory design, digital sustainability, design-based learning, multidimensional assessment framework.