=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1450/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Make2Learn: Fostering Engagement and Creativity in Learning through Making
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1450/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1450
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iwec/GiannakosDIK15a
}}
==Make2Learn: Fostering Engagement and Creativity in Learning through Making==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1450/paper1.pdf
Make2Learn: Fostering Engagement and Creativity in
Learning through Making
Michail N. Giannakos 1, Monica Divitini 1, Ole Sejer Iversen 2 and Pavlos Koulouris 3
1
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
{michailg, divitini}@idi.ntnu.no
2
Participatory IT Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
oiversen@cs.au.dk
3
Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Athens, Greece
pkoulouris@ea.gr
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
– Confucius
Abstract. The International Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful
Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn) aims to discuss the intro-
duction of creative and joyful production of artifacts “maker movement” in the
learning processes. A variety of environments have been developed by research-
ers to introduce making principles to young students. Making principles enable
them foster co-creativity and joy in learning processes and construct knowledge.
By involving students in the design decisions they begin to develop technological
fluency and the needed competences, in a joyful way. Make2Learn aims to bring
together international researchers, educators, designers, and makers for the ex-
ploration of making principles towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning
competences, by employing the state art aspects of entertainment technologies,
new media, gaming, robotics, toys and applications. The main objective is to
build a research community around this topical area. In particular, Make2Learn
aims to develop a critical discussion about the well-established practices and en-
tertainment technologies of the maker movement, and expected outcomes of put-
ting them into practice under different spaces such as Hackerspaces, Mak-
erspaces, TechShops, FabLabs etc. This will allow us to better understand and
improve the value of Maker philosophy and the role of entertainment technolo-
gies to support teaching and learning.
Keywords: Maker movement, entertainment technologies, creativity, knowledge
construction, technological fluency, constructionist
1 BACKGROUND
Digital artifacts that enable people to exchange, create, and distribute information have,
in the past couple of decades, profoundly reshaped the way we work and live [7]. The
Copyright © 2015 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Make2Learn 2015 workshop at ICEC’15, September 29, 2015, Trondheim, Norway.
1
creative production of digital artifacts and use of entertainment technologies in learning
activities has been linked to teaching new computer and design literacy skills [1]. Com-
mon inspiration is the work of Papert [6] that stresses the importance of creating a 'fe-
licitous' environment to facilitate learning. The idea here is that the students benefit
from being happy and in a carefree and creative environment. In accordance with Pa-
pert, Csikszentmihalyi’s [3] research has exhibited that students’ motivation is highly
predictive of achievement; however, educational systems neglect creative and joyful
aspects on learning activities. Educational programmes focus on recall and reproduc-
tion abilities instead of emphasizing the development of problem solving, creative
thinking and decision-making abilities.
Digital artifacts have the potential to make the symbolic and abstract manipulations
involved in creative procedures more concrete and manageable for young students [2].
For example, artifacts allow students to learn by iteratively testing, rebuilding their de-
signs and working collaboratively. The interactions between the young students and the
artifacts in creative and joyful activities are vital [4]. During the past decade, we have
seen an increased appearance of environments and community spaces offering diverse
opportunities for young students to facilitate learning through construction. Environ-
ments like Scratch, Alice and Storytelling Alice and spaces like Hackerspaces, Mak-
erspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs have allowed researchers to empirically investigate
the potential benefits of the maker movement towards the acquisition of 21st Century
learning competences. Collecting and discussing around those advances will allow us
to formulate better understanding of several technical and practical aspects that could
be valuable in designing effective making activities to foster joyful engagement and
creativity in learning.
2 OBJECTIVES
The advances of digital environments, entertainment technologies, manufacturing
equipment and community spaces offer diverse opportunities for making practices to
facilitate learning, especially when supported by engaging and joyful entertainment
technologies and designed in an appropriate pedagogical manner. From current re-
search, it is difficult to tell what aspects of environments, engaging-entertainment tech-
nologies, applications, equipment and practices can have a positive impact.
The current drive in many countries to teach design and technology competences to
all has potential to empower and support making as a creative, joyful and problem-
solving tasks. However, there are a number of challenges in ensuring that procedures,
tools and environments, embody appropriate progression and engender motivation and
joyful. This workshop will attempt to address these key research challenges.
One of our main objectives is to bring together researchers, educators, designers who
are interested for the exploration of making principles and supportive entertainment
technologies towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences.
Make2Learn aims to provide an environment where participants will get opportunities
to: develop their research skills; increase their knowledge base; collaborate with others
in their own and complementary research areas; and discuss their own work.
2
3 CONCLUSIONS
The contributions of Make2Learn covered several topics, such as tangible technologies,
computer science and programming education, empirical examinations, augmented re-
ality applications in schools and best practices to foster creativity in learning. The work-
shop proceedings are freely accessible from CEUR-WS series (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-
1450/).
In particular, Alsos [10] presents a programming course, where students of interac-
tion design used Arduino to build interactive everyday things. Interaction Designers
need to know and understand the virtual material they work with – in other words they
need to know basic programming in order to make their products highly interactive. As
illustrative examples, Alsos presents the six interactive innovative products made by
the students. Videos of all the products are available on http://bit.ly/1K4YPYB
Svanæs [11] describes experiences from an introductory course for first-year com-
puter science students. During the course Arduino, robot programming and app devel-
opment with Processing was used to foster engagement and creativity. The main learn-
ing objective for the students was to learn basic hardware and software skills, while at
the same time motivating for further computer science courses. The major challenges
were related to creating exercises, educational material and a physical work environ-
ment for the students that allowed for creativity in the spirit of the maker culture. Cru-
cial factors were found the development of a high number of well-documented small
and complete examples as well as the adequate experience and training of teaching
assistants.
Koulouris [12] presents the EC C2Learn project, C2Learn aims to foster co-creativ-
ity in learning through digital gaming activities whose design and development is
grounded on rigid theoretical foundations. The project is shaped as a progression from
theoretical foundations to design, development, pilot implementation and evaluation in
real life educational settings. Careful pedagogical and game designs have defined the
elements of learners’ gameful digital experiences and produced the specifications for
the development of the corresponding technologies and activities. Throughout the pro-
ject, school communities have been engaged in iterative dialogic cycles leading to de-
sign decisions, their implementation and evaluation in real-life educational settings.
Koulouris describes that, despite the fact that C2Learn is originating in a different con-
text, there is a direct contribution to the ‘maker movement’.
More et al., [13] discuss the making of interactive board games as a learning activity.
They present AnyBoard platform which is currently under development, and demon-
strate how AnyBoard supports the design and implementation of board games. The in-
novation of their approach stems from the fact that they do not use a game board virtu-
alised on an interactive surface, but rather achieve interactivity through technology-
augmented game pieces. Hence, they offer a broad design space and low costs of the
final product.
Papavlasopoulou et al., [14] present the design and implementation of a computer
science education, with the goal to encourage students to acquire programming skills
and become creators and not only mere consumers. This paper presents an initial ex-
3
ploratory evaluation of the workshop program and the development of a set of guide-
lines for improving students’ experience. The results aim to inform designers and re-
searchers about the impact of a) gamefulness, b) guidance, c) programming experience,
d) pro-grammable hardware platforms and e) technical problems in the design and im-
plementation of creative programing experiences.
Karamanoli and Tsinakos [15] present a literature review focused on Augmented
Reality (AR) and its current and future incorporation in modern education via various
context aware technologies (e.g. tablets, smartphones). AR can provide opportunities
for more interactive and joyful educational experiences, especially when combined
with Open Course Project situations, such as the one which is available at the Eastern
Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology in Greece. With the main purpose to
inform “creators” and stimulate “users” to engage with this promising technology
throughout the educational process.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND THE WAY AHEAD
The advances of digital environments, technologies, manufacturing equipment and
community spaces offer diverse opportunities for making practices to facilitate learn-
ing, especially when supported by engaging and joyful entertainment technologies and
designed in an appropriate pedagogical manner. From current research, it is difficult to
tell what aspects of environments, technologies, applications, equipment and practices
can have a positive impact.
The current drive in many countries to teach 21st century skills to all has potential to
empower and support making as a creative, joyful, problem-solving and critical think-
ing tasks. However, there are a number of challenges in ensuring that procedures, tools
and environments, embody appropriate progression and engender motivation and joy-
ful.
To explore the future of technologies, tools, and various spaces to foster engagement
and creativity in learning, we seek to promote interest in well-established tools and
practices of the maker movement, and expected outcomes of putting them into practice
under different spaces such as Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, TechShops, FabLabs etc.
This will allow us to better understand and improve the value of Maker philosophy as
well as to accelerate the process of disciplinary convergence. We aspire to bridge com-
puter science, design, HCI and related disciplines to encourage ambitious research pro-
jects that could yield potent tools for many students to use. This workshop is imple-
mented with an aim to collect high quality studies around this topical area, to envision
what the next generation of technologies, environments, spaces and practices might
look like. In particular, future work need to:
1. Accelerate research on Maker Movement by proposing ways to create greater interest
and synergies among researchers, educators, students, policymakers, and industrial de-
velopers,
2. Promote rigorous multidimensional and multidisciplinary methods and implement
rigorous experimentation strategies and metrics for in-depth longitudinal case studies,
4
3. Design tools, kits and spaces for individuals to promote "low floor" (easy to get
started) and a "high ceiling" (opportunities to create increasingly complex projects over
time) opportunities for young students.
5 Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Kirsten Panton for accepting our invitation to give keynote
presentation. We would like to thank the workshop Program Committee members for
contributing to the success of Make2Learn as well as the workshop and conference
chairs for their constructive comments and their helpful assistance during the prepara-
tion and throughout the workshop, special thanks go to Letizia Jaccheri for her support
and encouragement. Last but not least, we thank our sponsors: NTNU, Trondheim Sci-
ence Museum, C2Learn EC project, KODELØYPA and FABLAB@SCHOOL.dk.
6 References
1. Buechley, L., Eisenberg, M., Catchen, J. and Crockett, A.: The LilyPad Arduino: Using Com-
putational Textiles to Investigate Engagement, Aesthetics, and Diversity in Computer Science
Education. In Proc. CHI ‘08, ACM Press, 423-432 (2008)
2. Cassell, J.: Towards a Model of Technology and Literacy Development: Story Listening Sys-
tems, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25(1), 75-105 (2004)
3. Csikszentmihalyi, M.: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Har-
per Collins, (1996).
4. Giannakos, M. N., & Jaccheri, L.: What motivates children to become creators of digital en-
riched artifacts?. In Proc. C&C 2013, ACM Press, 104-113 (2013)
5. Giannakos, M. N., & Jaccheri, L.: Code Your Own Game: The Case of Children with Hearing
Impairments. Entrtainment Computing - ICEC 2014. Springer, 108-116 (2014)
6. Papert, S.: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books New York,
NY (1980)
7. Resnick, M. et al.: Design Principles for Tools to Support Creative Thinking. Technical Re-
port: NSF Workshop Report on Creativity Support Tools. Washington, DC (2005)
8. Ryokai, K., Lee, M. J., and Breitbart, J. M.: Children’s storytelling and programming with
robotic characters. In Proc. C&C 2009, ACM Press, 19-28 (2009)
9. Shneiderman, B., et al.: Creativity support tools: Report from a US National Science Founda-
tion sponsored workshop. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 20(2), 61-
77 (2006)
10. Alsos, O. A.: Teaching product design students how to make everyday things interactive with
Arduino, In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful Engage-
ment and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol. 1450, 7-14 (2015)
11. Svanæs, D.: A Maker Approach to Computer Science Education: Lessons Learned from a
First-Year University Course, In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to
Foster Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol.
1450, 15-20 (2015)
5
12. Koulouris, P.: Games Fostering Co-Creativity in Learning as Contributions to the "Maker
Movement", In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful En-
gagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol. 1450, 21-28
(2015)
13. Mora, S., Fagerbekk, T., Di Loreto, I., Divitini. M.: Making interactive board games to learn:
Reflections on AnyBoard, In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster
Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol. 1450,
29-36 (2015)
14. Papavlasopoulou, S., Giannakos, M.N., Jaccheri. L.: Designing Creative Programing Experi-
ences for 15 Years Old Students, In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to
Foster Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol.
1450, 37-44 (2015)
15. Karamanoli, P., Tsinakos. A.: Use of Augmented Reality in terms of creativity in School
learning, In Proceedings of the Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful Engage-
ment and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn 2015), CEUR-WS, Vol. 1450, 45-53 (2015)
6