=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2901/short6
|storemode=property
|title=A Toolkit and Lessons for Designing Smart Things with Children for Outdoor Environments
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2901/short6.pdf
|volume=Vol-2901
|authors=Rosella Gennari,Maristella Matera,Alessandra Melonio,Mehdi Rizvi,Efthychia Roumelioti
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/chitaly/GennariMMRR21
}}
==A Toolkit and Lessons for Designing Smart Things with Children for Outdoor Environments ==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2901/short6.pdf
A Toolkit and Lessons for Designing Smart Things with Children
for Outdoor Environments*
Rosella Gennaria, Maristella Materab, Alessandra Melonioa, Mehdi Rizvib, and Eftychia
Roumeliotia
a
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani 3, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
b
Politecnico di Milano, via Ponzio 34/5, 20133 Milan, Italy
Abstract
Smart things are present in children’s life, from smart watches to smart toys. Designing smart things with
children can help them understand the inner working of smart things and reflect on the usage of technology.
This paper stems from action research around smart-thing design with children, conducted across three years,
in diverse countries and with different children, and mainly for outdoors’ environments. The analysis of data
gathered across the research enabled authors of this paper to distil practical guidelines for smart-thing design
toolkits for children, which helped children design for a given environment and reflect across design. They
might help other researchers organise smart-thing design with children, encompassing different design
stages, and make them reflect in design, in relation to the chosen environment.
Keywords
Children, design, smart thing, nature, outdoors, action research
1. Introduction
The role of children in design has been explored extensively in the Child-Computer Interaction and
related communities. In the participatory design tradition, researchers or practitioners team up with
children so as to support the ideation of novel design solutions and, lately, to reflect while ideating so
as to foster critical skills in children’s approach to technology. In the making tradition, children are
invited to program and prototype solutions, and tinker with different sorts of material, in an informal
learning context. In both traditions, children’s benefits should be considered in the design process.
However, in order to ensure that children’s benefits are considered in the entire design process, from
ideation to programming and prototyping, design needs to be framed within an encompassing research
approach, which plans for and assesses such benefits. Authors of this manuscript chose to frame design
with children with action-research [1]. Specifically, this paper stems from the analysis of an action
research experience, longer than three years, with 70 children, 41% females and 59% males, aged 8–16
years old, and across different towns in Italy and Greece, e.g., [3,4,6]. See the table below.
Along years, children were challenged to design smart things, mainly for outdoor-nature parks, e.g., a
smart tree which invites park visitors to listen to its story. The SNaP design toolkit was purposefully
developed and evolved, so as to support children’s gameful design of smart things, according to the
chosen environment. Notice that, whereas playful design aims at affording so-called “paidic qualities”,
characteristic for unstructured play, gameful design aims at embedding “ludic qualities or gamefulness
(the experiential qualities characteristic for gameplay)” in design [2].
Proceedings of the NatureHCI 2021 workshop, co-located with the CHItaly 2021 conference, July 12, 2021, Bolzano, Italy.
EMAIL: gennari@inf.unibz.it (A. 1); maristella.matera@polimi.it (A. 2); alessandra.melonio@unibz.it (A. 3); syedmehdi.rizvi@polimi.it
(A. 4); eftychia.roumelioti@stud-inf.unibz.it (A. 5)
ORCID: 0000-0003-0063-0996 (A. 1); 0000-0003-0552-8624 (A. 2); 0000-0001-6655-1946 (A. 3); 0000-0001-8386-5779 (A. 4); 0000-
0003-3293-4521 (A. 5)
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Actions were the smart-thing design workshops, in which children used the toolkit for designing and
reflecting in design. In other words, in line with the perspective adopted by the workshop but with
children as main actors, actions aimed at making children explore the possible usages of technology,
reflect on technology and critically develop technology for nature environments.
Data were uniformly gathered and analysed, leading to the reflections which are the focus of this paper.
The reflections are shaped as lessons concerning gameful smart-thing design for children, which we
hope can spark interest in the community of researchers willing to engage in design of technology-
enhanced nature environments.
When How Where Participants
Summer and Autumn In presence Athens, Milan, Bolzano 12 (8F, 4M)
2018
Summer 2019 In presence Bolzano 27 (10F, 17M)
Autumn 2019 In presence Bolzano 4 (1F, 3M)
Summer 2020 At a distance, in Ioannina, Milan, Bolzano 7 (3F, 4M)
presence
Winter 2020 At a distance Salerno 20 (7F, 13M)
Total n. of participant children: 70 (29F, 41M)
FabLearn Europe / MakeEd 2021, June 02–03, 2021, Virtual Conference First Author, et al.
157 The initial reference
2. Design framework for structuring the design process in workshops with children was the one by Smith
Model
158
et al. [2015a]. This was adapted to the requirements for smart thing design with children across the COVID-19 pandemic
159
A reference
and actions, modeltangibles
as interactive for structuring
evolved the design
in the workprocess
by Rizviinetworkshops with children is by Smith
al. [17, 18, 36].
160
et al. [7]. This was adapted to the requirements for smart-thing design with children along three
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
years of action research.
Figure 1. The design model
Fig. 1. The smart thing design framework
170
171 In the resulting model, smart-thing design starts with the exploration of smart things, so as to
172 In thefamiliarise
resulting framework, smart
children with thething design
design starts with
language the exploration
and what of smart
smart things things,
are made so as todevices
of—input familiarise children
173 with thewith
design language
certain and whatoutput
properties, smart devices
things are made
with of—input
other devices
properties, with
and certain
things of properties,
the chosenoutput
naturedevices with
174 environment, e.g., trees
other properties, and things of anorenvironment.
benches. It steps through
It steps thetheir
through ideation of smart
ideation, when things, when
di�erent different
ideas are brainstormed
175 ideas are brainstormed over, and conceptualisation, when children converge on an idea and
176
over, and conceptualisation, when children converge on an idea. It moves then children into the programming and
play it out. It moves then children into the programming and prototyping of their ideas of smart
177 prototyping of for
things theirthe
ideas of smart
chosen things. AllAll
environment. stages
stagesareare
intertwined
intertwinedwith multiple
with re�ection
multiple stimuli,
reflection from peers and
stimuli,
178 experts alike.
from See
peersFigure 1. All stages
and experts alike.areSee
made “tangible”
Figure 1. All and connected
stages are madeby “tangible”
means of the toolkit,
and explained
connected by next.
179 means of the toolkit, explained next.
180
3.2 A Toolkit for Smart Thing Design
181
3. The SNaP Design Toolkit
182 The framework itself is centred around a gami�ed toolkit for designing smart things with children, namely SNaP,
183 which evolved with toolkits
Generative the framework
are veryalong
oftenaction-research
used in designcycles. Figure
processes to 2facilitate
recaps all
thethe main actions
ideation and the main
stage of
184
components of the toolkits
smart-thing design,which were
whereas used in the actions.
programming and prototyping toolkits are employed in the related
185
stages of smart-thing design. These tools can serve as a common “design language” for
186
designers, researchers and users in the design process. Game cards, in particular, have been
187
188
189
190
191
and expanded on them through a physical version of SNaP, and companion programming technology. These children
were able to take up others’ ideas and programmed them to completion.
⌅ Hybrid design should promote collaborations (e.g., asynchronous), taking care of ethical considerations, and
include children across frontiers.
used to engage non-experts in a wide range of design processes, acting as sources of inspiration
5 GUIDELINES FOR SMART-THING DESIGN TOOLKITS
and a tangible, play design material, e.g., [3,4].
5.1 Toolkits Game
withcards can be of
Components used to motivate
Smart Things participants towards the design goal and help them
understand its context. Examples are scenario and mission cards of Tiles [5]. Although not
In case of toolkits for generic end users, technology tends to be represented in an abstract manner on cards. Examples
necessarily in the form of game cards, motivation material is frequently used in workshops
are Tiles cards,
withwhich represent
children, e.g.,what
the people
work can by do with et
Smith input
al.,and output
e.g., theydevices of smart things,
used briefing such as
statements to human
start
actions (e.g.,immersing
touch) and receiving
childrenfeedback (e.g., sound)
in a scenario [7]. [31].
SNaP Similarly, the IoT Design
also employed Deckbriefing
similar includes statements
input and output
for
cards oriented to a perception and action mechanism, for helping non-experts design the behavior of smart devices for
immersing children in a context, as well as motivation cards in the form of mission cards [10].
giving the design goals; by playing these cards, each player chooses her or his own
The IoT Service Kit contains cards for sensors and interactions to represent functionalities of input and output devices mission for
the smart things under design. Cards for smart things also tend to have so-called technology
in an abstract way [6]. The Lighting User Experience (LUX) cards contain input cards to describe the data source for
decks for input (e.g., buttons) and output devices (e.g., LED matrix), which are related to
the design ofphysical
smart lighting
devices.solutions
Cards[9]. Generic
need input
also to and output
represent the cards,
thingssuch as made
to be the above ones,
smart, have
and thusthethey
potential
are
advantage ofhighly
being usable for ideating di�erent smart things. However, they can be di�cult to
context dependent. In the work reported in this paper, they were related to park elements, match with technology
for programming
such smart things,or
as benches and engage
trees. non-experts
Examples in this.
of such decks of cards are in Figure 2, left side.
Cards for Cards areinpart
children, of a board
particular, need togame,
be havephysical or digital,
more concrete which guides
representations thanchildren
cards for(1) to explore
adults cards
if their aim is to
and hence components of smart things, (2) to brainstorm and ideate with cards,
engage children in the programming and prototyping parts. For example, Know-Cards include input and output cards
(3) and finally
to conceptualise ideas of smart things. The game board embeds different reflection lenses that
that represent speci�c electronic components for understanding and designing IoT devices [8]. There are also cards that
children explore while designing, e.g., “does your idea make sense for the mission of making
represent inputs andinteract
people outputs forwithspeci�c
natureprogramming
elements?”.platforms,
See Figure such2 as
forMaker andlevel
the first Scratch
of cards [38, 40].
the board However,
game, for
these cards do not support
exploring children
thing cards in thetechnology
and ideation part, and and
cards they for
are starting
strictly related to a very
the ideation of speci�c technology.
smart things.
Figure 2: Examples of cards (left), and the first level of the ideation tool of SNaP, which contextualises
Fig. 5. Smart this
thingdesign stageand
components in aboard
nature
forenvironment familiar
the environment relatedto
to participating children
a nature outdoors (right)
park, part of the SNaP toolkit used in
Summer 2019
Besides tools for ideating, the SNaP toolkit also supports the transition of ideas into interactive
Therefore,prototypes of smart
design toolkits things.children
for engaging In the research
across an reported in this
entire design paper,
process the come
should digital version
with of SNaP
technology cards
enables children to automatically generate a basic program to start from in the block-based
or elements that are easy for children to match with technology for children, and yet su�ciently general to apply to
Makecode programming environment (available at makecode.microbit.org/). See Figure 3. The
9
program is generated from the input and output cards which are part of children’s
conceptualisation of a smart thing. Then children can continue exploring how to make their
ideas evolve through programming and prototyping, besides reflecting in such stages, as well,
on the technology under design.
FabLearn Europe / MakeEd 2021, June 02–03, 2021, Virtual Conference First Author, et al.
261 programming environment of children’s choice, e.g., with visual blocks of Makecode. The following guideline is thus
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
Figure 3: The latest version of the SNaP toolkit, digital, which automatically generates programs for
277
children’s ideas in Fig.the Makecode design
3. An encompassing block-based programming
process, centred around SNaP environment: see
278
279
snap.inf.unibz.it/play.php
280
derived, whereas guidelines for each single stage are discussed separately below.
281
282 4. ⌅Lessons
Design withand Conclusions
children should encompass diverse design stages, centred around a design toolkit: (1) exploration
283
and familiarisation with smart thing design; (2) ideation and conceptualisation of smart thing ideas; (3)
284
285
Along three years
programming of research,
and prototyping children
of smart used the SNaP toolkit. Across all years, data were
thing ideas.
286
uniformly gathered and classified, e.g., in relation to children's usages of SNaP. Data were
287 4.1.2lately processed
Exploration with a contentThe
and familiarisation. analysis and reflected
design process suggestedover so as researchers,
by several to extract guidelines foretsmart-
such as Iversen al. [2017],
288 thing toolkits for children. The main lessons are extracted and elaborated in the remaining
does not always involve a structured exploration stage. It is important, however, that the process is structured part so
thatofchildren
this paper.
289
become familiar with the components of the things under design before they move on to the next
290
291 design stages [49]. In smart thing design with SNaP, the exploration and familiarisation stage was structured by
292
4.1. Gameful Design
the SNaP toolkit, as follows. The exploration stage employed SNaP cards for input and output devices, and it asked
293 children to play and match them with devices for programming and prototyping, e.g., via quizzes. Last but not least,
294 Games or game elements help motivate and guide children in the design of their smart things.
the exploration stage o�ered children many sca�olding examples, to freely tinker with. For instance, in Summer
295 In the research reported in this paper, design was made gameful with the SNaP toolkit, offering
2020, children had SNaP boards with ideas of smart things and matching programs to tinker with in the Makecode
296 children a fun and not-intimidating way to explore the design process. Children, being in
297 programming environment
general familiar with[30], e.g., they
playing could
board changeeasily
games, the threshold
graspedfor how
the temperature input device
to use SNaP’s boardsandand
makeits the
298 smart thing react and
mechanics, whenthey
the environment was hot
were motivated to instead
try to of cold.the winning condition even in cases of no
reach
299
300
former experience, e.g., to make the town park more attractive for their peers.
⌅ The exploration stage should make children familiar with smart things (i.e., what they are composed of)
301
and the design toolkit. Many sca�olding examples need to be o�ered, which children can tinker with.
302 The design process should be structured as a game or with game elements so as to motivate
303 and guide children in design.
4.1.3 Ideation and conceptualisation. During ideation and conceptualisation of smart thing ideas, divergent and
304
convergent thinking enable children to open up their design process, consider new perspectives and subsequently
305
4.2. Story-line
discard aspects during their attempt to reach a design solution [23]. Ideation and conceptualisation should guide children
306
307 accordingly, and tangibly so. For instance, in the research reported in this paper, that was supported by the SNaP toolkit,
308 In games, story-lines or narratives, when present, help motivate players towards the game goal,
and especially its game boards for �rstly ideating as many ideas as possible (divergent thinking) and then re�ecting
309 and immerse them into the game. In the same vein, briefings were used in design with children
310
on an
to idea to conceptualise
communicate (convergent
the design goal,thinking).
e.g., [7].Tangible outcomes were
In SNaP–framed children’s
design, boards,goal
the design one per
waschild,
sharedwhich
311 conceptualised an idea ofofa smart
via the story-line SNaP,thing to carry
whereas on in thecards
mission last design stage.turned the goal into objectives for
of SNaP
312 smart things. For instance, in Summer 2019, the story-line started as follows: “we need to help
6
the Mayor of our town to design a new nature park with smart things for your peers” [4]. A
mission card for a smart thing by a child was thus “make people interact in the park”.
The story-line or narrative should motivate children and make the design goal tangible (e.g.,
through missions for players to accomplish).
4.3. Mechanics and Aesthetics
In SNaP-framed design, the mechanics and aesthetics of the toolkit helped children navigate
through the design process and contextualise design in the chosen environment, e.g., the
Talvera park of Bolzano represented in Figure 2, right side. The closed rule-bound nature of
games stimulates an awareness of structure and function, and it can transform spontaneous
decisions into more formal understanding. Children, when playing for the second time with
SNaP, were in fact able to remember the game rules and levels which helped them proceed
with design with no help from adults, indicating their understanding of the process.
The game mechanics and aesthetics should be designed so as to offer a familiar rule-bound
structure, which smoothly guides children along design and helps them become aware of its
stages in relation to the given environment.
4.4. Player Roles
In SNaP-framed design, roles for players were partly bound by the game mechanics, which
helped make children own their ideas, clarify adults' roles in design, and reflect with others
with specific roles. Without clearly specified roles, adults can greatly influence children's
design activities even without meaning it. The mechanics of the toolkits for supporting design
could thus be used to specify or negotiate the roles of all participants so as to embed them
clearly for all into the design process, as in the case of SNaP-framed design. Adults' roles, in
particular, should be defined according to children's varying requirements and benefits. For
instance, in in-presence workshops with SNaP, adults' role was part of the game rules and
guided seemingly by these, so that scaffolding was gradually decreasing as per children's
learning of design, one of the expected benefits of their participation in design. Their learning
was assessed by triangulating and processing different data, e.g., learning questionnaire data
and the evolution of children’s smart things over time [4].
Player roles should be defined in relation to design roles, so as to clarify responsibilities and
tasks in design, e.g., playing the expert of a design heuristics. In particular, the role of adults
should be adapted to the requirements of children and their expected benefits in design, e.g.,
engagement and learning in smart-thing design.
4.5. Reflections for and by Children
Toolkits should have lenses that help children critically reflect on specific aspects of the things
under design, in relation to the environment and technology-related risks. For instance, SNaP
has different reflection lenses, e.g., related to the consistency of the smart thing under design
for the chosen mission or safety-related risks for the environment or people for which/whom
the smart thing is designed. Lenses should come with questions and probes that help children
reflect critically and elaborate on their solutions. Moreover, reflection lenses should adaptable
and embed children’s own reflections in design.
Tangible and adequate reflection lenses, with questions and probes, should be embedded in
playful toolkits for children, in relation to “things” of the environment and risks technology
can bring therein, besides able to capture children’s own reflections in design.
Acknowledgements
Authors of this paper acknowledges the contribution of all participant children across three
years of work, besides their parents or teachers. Financial support was granted through the
SNaP, GEKI and EMPATHY projects.
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