Interacting with Technology

Lecture 4: Children and Technology (Case Studies)

Dr Dawn Woodgate

Summary of Lecture

Intention to show progress of one research stream from the SENSE project (mentioned by Danae in Lecture 3) to the present time.

• Review of eScience in Education.

• Mobile (Phone)s in Schools.

• PARTICIPATE Schools project.

The SENSE Project and Beyond

SENSE :

• Hands on approach to learning science.

• Used specialised sensors and software to allow children to collect and visualise their own scientific data.

• Appropriated Participatory Design (PD) methods in the development of these technologies.

SENSE Project (continued.)

• Children in 2 schools, in Nottingham and Sussex.

• Children used mobile carbon monoxide sensors to measure pollution levels in local environment, and used software tools to analyse their data and to share with others.

• Began to explore how emerging networking technologies (eScience tools) could enhance science education, by supporting collaboration between different schools and with scientists.

Summary of Results

Results of video analysis and teacher interviews suggested that the context-inclusive approach taken was important for three reasons:

• It allowed individuals to reflect upon method as part of data collection.

• Secondly, it provides an aide-memoire to groups who have collected data together, in interpreting results.

• Thirdly, it allows new participants who have carried out similar activities, to understand new perspectives on both their own, and others’ data.

eScience in Education: A Review (Woodgate and StantonFraser 2005)

• Funding from JISC as follow up to the SENSE project.

• Context: Perceived loss of interest in science amongst the young, fears about the implications of this for the economy in the future (White Paper 2000).

• Remit: to provide an overview, or snapshot, of the emerging field of eScience in the context of education as it stood at that time; and to consider some of its implications.

What is eScience?

We found:

• It was in itself an ‘emerging field’.

• There was no one, universally agreed definition of ‘eScience’, even amongst practitioners.

A Definition:

Professor Sir John Taylor, Director General of the UK Research Councils:

“science increasingly done through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, terascale computing resources and high performance visualisation".

An Analogy:

• The ‘computational grid’: The idea is to provide a reliable, easy-to-access source of computing power and/or data on demand through the use of computer networks, corresponding to the way that the national electrical grid works to provide consumers with a reliable electricity supply.

How Does This Apply to Education?

• No previous attempt to define what eScience might mean in the context of education.

• Our definition: : ‘The use of ICT in education, to enable local and remote communication and collaboration on scientific topics and with scientific data.’

We Found…

• There were very few examples that fitted within this definition, though a wider range that partially fitted.

• Internationally, the work of Roy Pea and his colleagues is important, as they were providing educational eScience activities to schools with the technologies available in the early 1990s.

eScience in the UK

• Few examples at that time, mainly small scale.• However, BBC Springwatch campaign also fitted

within our criteria, forming an important early link between eScience and the idea of ‘user- generated content’ – people contributing their own (broadcast in this case) content rather than merely being passive consumers of professionally-produced media.

• Important pre-cursor to the PARTICIPATE project.

Next Steps: Mobile (Phone)s in Schools Project

• Further funding was secured from JISC, to form partnerships with potential collaborators in industry and the media, and come up with ideas for a much larger scale eScience based research project.

• Mobile (Phone)s in Schools was a pilot study carried out under this funding stream, to begin to extend the development of mobile technologies (including software for phones) for use in school science lessons.

Activities

• Collaboration between Bath (Psychology) and Nottingham (Computer Science) researchers.

• Also assistance from Science Scope, a Bath based company that makes science education equipment.

Aims:

• Investigate attitudes of schools and teachers to mobile technologies via teacher consultation.

• Participatory design exercises with a class of Year 9 school students.

Participatory Design (PD)

• (PD) has its origins in the 1970s in Scandinavia, when it came to be used in the design of new technologies in the workplace (Bjerknes et al 1987).

• More recently, PD methodologies have been adapted for use with children, for example by Druin et al (1999, 2001), Scaife et al (1997).

Our Challenges:

• UK school curriculum not very flexible.• Most PD work with children done with small

numbers of hand picked pupils in a controlled, lab situation, over a large number of extended sessions. In this case: a class of 30 (approx) lively Year 9 students (13-14 years old), in school.

• Limited time - 6 x 1 hour sessions.• Need to keep the sessions fast moving and

interesting, and be very organised!

Session 1• Introduction to the project, brainstorm of

ideas: What can be sensed in the local environment?

Type of Pollution Where is it? When does it happen?

How does it get there?

CARBON MONOXIDE - fumes In town, near main roads e.g. High Street, Gloucester Road, garages, near the quarry, in built-up areas, around the shops, supermarket

Rush hour – 8.30am & 5.30pm, all the time, during

traffic jams

Cars, lorries, trains, commuters, quarry deliveries, public transport

CARBON MONOXIDE - smoking

Pubs, especially around High Street Evenings People

LEAD POLLUTION Along main roads Rush hour – 8.30am & 5.30pm, all the time, during

traffic jams

Cars, lorries, trains, commuters,

quarry deliveries, public transport

NOISE - cars In town, near main roads e.g. High Street, near school, in built-up areas

Rush hour – 8.30am & 5.30pm, during traffic jams

Cars, people

NOISE - children Near school To and from school, rush hour- 8.30am & 5.30pm

Children, parents

NOISE - people Pubs and restaurants To and from school, rush hour- 8.30am & 5.30pm

People

NOISE - drunk people Pubs and restaurants Evenings People

NOISE - houses In & around houses, in built up areas People, cars

LIGHT High Street All year round, at night

Town people, street lamps, house lights

RADIATION Oldbury Power Station, hospital, school All year round, most of the time

Owners, radioactive tubes, radiation waves

HEAT

VANDALISM People

LITTER Near the stream, Mundy playing fields, North Road,

All year round Town people

TOXIC WASTE / CHEMICAL River Severn All year round Owners

COLOUR

HEAT

Session 2• Demonstration of sensors by ScienceScope• Light levels measured within school grounds• Demonstration of how data can be displayed

Session 3• Introduction to phones, ‘Bluetooth challenge’• Introduction to low-tech prototyping• Group work: Discussed ideas, produced

prototypes of sensors, presented ideas to class

Session 4

• Gave some feedback on some of the children’s ideas.• First high-tech prototype.• Mobile phone connects to Science Scope Logbook

datalogger via Bluetooth.• Piloted temperature, light and velocity sensors.• The children thought this would be good for fixed

sensors, but didn’t like the idea of carrying all this equipment around for mobile sensing; ‘What’s the point of having the phone when you still need the other stuff?’

Session 5

• Further feedback on first prototype, ideas gathering for second iteration.

• Interface design session.

Session 6

• Introduced second iteration of the sound sensor; a stand-alone sound sensor which used the mobile phone’s microphone.

Activities

• Children hypothesized whereabouts in the school and grounds it would be more (or less) noisy.

• Groups went to different parts of the school and grounds to collect data on phones.

• Each group took pictures / video of the context of their data.

• Then came back into class, data downloaded to a PC, then displayed as Excel graphs

• Further feedback from pupils.

Key FindingsSchools and teachers:

• Virtually all UK secondary school children have mobile phones.• School have prohibitive policies on mobile phones.• Despite this, there was less resistance among teachers than we had thought, and

seemed to be indicated by the literature.

Children:

• The sessions were ‘quick and dirty’, only 1 hour (lesson time) available for each.• Due to time constraints not all tasks were completed.

HOWEVER, • The activities were engaging. Even disaffected students were enthusiastic.• This technique (alongside other methods such as ethnographic studies, laboratory

studies) is useful for: • Generating a lot of ideas quickly.• Rigorous testing of prototypes in the situation in which they will be used.

Also

• Produced two working prototypes.

• Fed directly into the PARTICIPATE project.

• Children are quite capable of dealing with pilot technologies. If it is explained, they accept that things sometimes don’t work as expected. They give good feedback!

PARTICIPATE• Much larger scale project, over £3m funding from EPSRC / Technology

Strategy Board over 3 years.• Partners are: Universities of Bath (Psychology) and Nottingham (Computer

Science), BBC, BT, Microsoft Research, Science Scope, Blast Theory.• Aims; different for different partners; some are very technical, but generally

to raise awareness of environmental issues among targeted user groups, and to explore issues around user generated content. Bath’s specific additional aims are to study how children and teachers collaborate both co-located within the same school, and remotely, between different schools, and what happens when activities roll out to multiple schools.

• 3 streams of work, which are to be integrated this year: schools, community, gaming.

• Brings together themes from previous studies; the local environment and own experiences as a motivator to engage with science, participatory design, collecting own data using sensors, importance of context, user generated content etc.

• www.participateonline.co.uk

PARTICIPATE Schools 1

Stage 1 Trial, we worked intensively with 2 schools over a 3 week period. Students collected data on environmental parameters on their journeys between home and school, using phone sound sensors as before, but this time with connectivity to GPS to give location information, and Science Scope dataloggers to collect other data (CO, temp etc).

PARTICIPATE Stage 1 Trial continued.

• Intention to visualize data from phones as trails in Google Earth, and data from Science Scope kit as ordinary graphs.

• Phone software in very early prototype stage, and there were some connectivity problems. However, we were able to obtain some early visualizations.

An Early Google Earth Visualization

Other Activities

• Children discussed their data in class with peers and teachers.

• ’60 Second Scientist’, children made short films about the activities, and what they had learned.

Early Findings

• Indications that even fairly bland self-collected data are engaging for children.

• Google Earth visualizations ‘wow factor’ in class.• ‘60 Second Scientist’ was more than merely a

fun activity for children; it was an effective reflection tool, encouraging them to think back to what they had done, discuss their experiences and look for new information.

Later School Trials

• As we rolled out to additional schools, it became impossible to provide the same amount of support in school.

• BBC commissioned a website to which member schools would have login access.

• This enables students and teachers to share data and work online.

• Stage 2 Trial, around 13 schools were involved at various levels of engagement.

• Also carried out a trial as part of the World Scout Jamboree held in the UK in 2007.

Website Demo

Currently

• Around 20 member schools, widely dispersed.• Activities presented as ‘Missions’ on the website.

Some use specialised technology, others only require what would normally be available in a school.

• Collaborations with teachers in developing ‘Missions’ for schools.

• Moving towards an integrated trial; schools providing some seed content for a national campaign based on environmental ‘Missions’ to take place later this year.

Examples of Schools Content

• Posters• 60 Sec movies• Data trails – current visualizations.

JData3D software integrates sensor data, GPS data and photographs & saves as a time and location stamped KMZ file to visualize in Google Earth.

• Also an XML file to visualize sensor and GPS data only in Google Maps.

Google Earth Visualizations demo

Next / Final Stages

• ‘Missions’ will be available via multiple platforms, IPTV, Web and mobile phone.

• Based on Nottingham’s Equip 2 system• Looking towards some level of integration

between Equip 2 and the Participate Schools website. However, due to concerns about data protection, child safety etc, the extent of such integration is still under discussion.

Some Observations

• The activities we are piloting seem to make children think beyond the activities themselves, about the scientific process itself.

• Integrating technology into subject teaching is still not easy, due to factors such the organisation of IT facilities in schools.

• Some early evidence that too much contextual information can inhibit discussion, and thus perhaps affect learning and retention. May require different types of studies to properly investigate this.

References• Bjerknes, G., Ehn, P., and Kyng, M. (1987) Computers and Democracy : a

Scandinavian challenge. Aldershot : Avebury, c1987.• Druin, A. (1999): ‘Cooperative Inquiry: Developing New Technologies for

Children with Children’ Proc. CHI ’99, ACM 1999, Pittsburgh, PA, USA., pp. 592-599.

• Gordin, D., Polman, J., & Pea, R. D. (1994). The Climate Visualizer: Sense-making through scientific visualization. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 3, 203-226.

• Gordin, D.N. & Pea, R.D. (1995). Prospects for scientific visualization as an educational technology. The Journal of Learning Sciences 4 (3) pp. 249-279.

• Gordin, D.N., Edelson, D. & Pea, R.D. (1995). The Greenhouse Effect Visualizer: A tool for the science classroom. Proceedings of the Fourth American Meteorological Society Education Symposium.

• Kanjo, E., Benford, S. Paxton, M., Chamberlain, A. Woodgate, D. and Stanton Fraser, D. (2007) 'MobGeoSen: Facilitating Personal GeoSensor Data Collection and Visualization using Mobile Phones' , Personal Ubiquitous Computing Journal, Springer ISSN 1617-4909 (Print) 1617-4917

References• Office of Science and Technology (2000) Excellence and Innovation: A Science and

Innovation Policy for the 21st Century. http://www.ost.gov.uk/enterprise/dtiwhite• Pea, R.D. (2002). Learning Science through Collaborative Visualizatin over the

Internet. Nobel Symposium (NS 120), ‘Virtual Museums and Public Understanding of Science and Culture. May 26-29 2002, Stockholm, Sweden.

• http://nobelprize.org/nobel/nobel-foundation/symposia/interdisciplinary/ns120/lectures/pea.pdf

• Scaife, M., Rogers, Y., Aldrich, F. and Davies, M. (1997): ‘Designing For or Designing With? Informant Design for Interactive Learning Environments’. Proc. CHI ’97, ACM, Atlanta, GA, USA, 22-27 March 1997, pp. 343-350.

• Woodgate, D., Stanton Fraser, D. Kanjo, E., Paxton M. and Benford, S. (2007) Mobile (Phone)s in Schools: Reflections on an Exercise in Participatory Design with Children ‘in the Wild’ Techniques and Methodologies for Studying Technology Use 'In The Wild' The Tenth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), 2007.ECSCW 2007, Limerick 25 September 2007.

http://www.cityware.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86&Itemid=48

References

• Woodgate, D. and StantonFraser, D. (2006) ) “eScience, Science Education and Technology Integration in the Classroom: Some Practical Considerations. Proc. workshop “e-Science in and Beyond the Classroom” : Usability, Practicability and Sensability”. At eScience 2006: 2nd IEEE International Conference on eScience and Grid Computing 2-4 December 2006, Amsterdam, NL.

• Woodgate, D. and Stanton Fraser, D. (2005) Review of eScience in Education (review report commissioned by JISC). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF2B4.pdf