Material pets, virtual spaces, isolated designers
Maneksha DuMont, Victor R. Lee · 2012
Novel computational technologies that incorporate aspects of youth's activities, toys and culture with more traditional computer-based technology have the potential to change the landscape of youth participation in computer programming and design. This paper describes an effort to combine and centralize these aspects and technologies into an activity called "Digible Pets". The Digible Pets project was developed to be part user-crafted touchable animal and part virtual digital pet. Crafted physical pets are programmed to interact within a virtual space through a PicoBoard. In this project, academically struggling students in an alternative school successfully designed, crafted and developed a Digible Pet over the course of five weeks. While the project was designed to encourage collaboration, students actually did little idea sharing or building within or between design groups. This paper explores how collaboration, and its potential to facilitate learning, was unintentionally constrained by both students' individual dispositions and the technology interfaces.