Abstract:

Early technology education in computer science is necessary to give children the opportunity to develop key competences they need for the 21st century at an early stage. This requires innovative and new methods to increase interest in technical topics.

Usually user centered design (when children are the users one speaks of child centered design) processes are carried out in order to gain insights for new products, sometimes with the secondary interest that the participants (children) learn something about design – but not to teach computer science or to conduct early technology education in computer science.

As an innovation, we research the use of a child centered design process to promote children in computer science. Children actively learn about the different phases of software development by participating in the child-centered design process that we have developed, carried out and evaluated.
While the classic user-centered design approach focused on the design process being oriented towards future users, there are further concepts that intensify the collaboration with the users. As an innovation, we have combined the classic user centered design (in our case child centered design) with the method of cooperative inquiry and bonded design.

According to Druin's model (Druin, 2002), the children assume four roles in a child centered design process: they are users, testers, informants and designers. We add a fifth role to the model – that of the learners by participating in the process.

The developed child centered design process is divided into four phases. Phase 1 deals with the design of symbols for a possible prototypical graphical user interface for a microworld suitable for kindergarten children aged 3 to 6 years, our target group. In phase 2, the interpretations of the symbols are worked out using card sorting. For phase 3, the children evaluated a click dummy of a micro world developed in PowerPoint. This was followed by an iteration of the prototype and a new evaluation in phase 4.

Children between the ages of 5 and 6 participated in the first implementation of the adapted child centered design process for early technology education in computer science. In addition, four children aged 3 to 4 years participated in phase 4. The implementation of the process was instrumentally recorded for research purposes and evaluated against a guideline. The knowledge gained from evaluating version 1 of the prototype was incorporated into version 2. The children were able to experience that their feedback was promptly incorporated into the further development of products and thus supported iterative work.

The analysis of the data obtained shows that participation in the child centered design process as a measure for early technology education promotes the following competences (categorized based on (Eguchi, 2007)): the professional competences in mathematics, computer science and technology in general as well as the academic competences of designing, documenting, reflecting, working cooperatively, thinking creatively, making decisions meet, solve problems, communicate, present and think spatially.

References:
[1] Druin, A. (2002). The role of children in the design of new technology. Behaviour and Information Technology, 21(1), 1-25
[2] Eguchi, A. (2007). Educational Robotics for Elementary School Classroom. Proc. of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education Int. Conf 2007 (pp. 2542–2549). San Antonio, Texas, USA: AACE.

Keywords:

Child centered design, early technology education in computer science, card sorting, usability, kindergarten, prototyping.