2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While researchers commonly treat humans as having agency—and even define agency as a human property—research on design has long troubled this notion by treating designing as a conversation with materials [1, 2]. In this way, the materials we offer learners might be unalterable, used functionally but unchanged, or modified dramatically in use [3]. This post-humanist stance brings attentions to the relationships between humans and non-human artifacts [4], and in decentering humans, foregrounds the agency imbued in materials by their creation and form [5, 6].

In this poster, we report results related to an NSF EEC CAREER project that characterizes framing agency—making decisions and learning in the process of framing design problems. Specifically, we sought to examine ways learners negotiated their agency with materials in the context of an informal STEM camp focused on learning about past, present, and future of radio frequency communications. The camp, supported by an NSF AISL project, aims to develop student understanding of wireless radio communication through making and playing games [7] . We used micro:bits, the small, BBC-developed microcontroller along with its block-based programming interface [8] and my:Talkies: a pair of paper templates a micro:bit is mounted into and then folded into a box [9]. The established nature of the my:Talkies indicate they have high agency [10] and could be potentially coercive.

We posed a design scenario of a community in need of radio communication systems [11], but asked students to provide their own framing. The constraints included needing to communicate to another micro:bit. Students completed a pre-ideation activity focused on supporting creativity and empathy [12] before individually planning their design solution [13]. Following several days of related activities and embodied games, developed their solution over two days.
We collected video recordings, interviews, and artifacts of youth participation in a week-long camp. We selected focal students for the current study to highlight variability (N=4). We used interaction analysis to make sense of the arc of framing with materials, then used discourse analysis to characterize students’ framing agency.

We found that although students received the same problem context, technology, craft materials, and base papercraft form (my:Talkies), they created a divergent set of designs. They initially showed low agency over the base form of the my:Talkies, not altering the paper structure itself. However, they negotiated agency with materials by adding to the my:Talkies and through the coding process [2]. Using the scenario of designing for a city’s future, students generated unique pro-social narratives. The inputs and outputs provided on the micro:bit (i.e. accelerometer, LED) also allowed students to make different choices. We illustrate these with vignettes in the poster and offer implications for supporting students to frame design problems with materials.