Empowering Students as Leaders of Co-Design for Block-Based Programming

Ally Limke, Nicholas Lytle, Maggie Lin, Sana Mahmoud, Marnie Hill, Veronica Cateté, Tiffany Barnes

Abstract: Educational software is rarely co-designed with teachers and students. We have created a novel co-design process that can help both teachers and students learn about human-computer interaction (HCI) and research methods while contributing to the design of educational systems that will benefit future students and teachers. We investigated the results of our process of mentoring two undergraduate students to lead participatory design (PD) sessions with three K-12 teachers. We found that this process exposed teachers and undergraduates to HCI research and design techniques, empowered undergraduates to lead design sessions, and encouraged knowledge transfer between the groups. Our lessons learned include ways to prepare students inexperienced with HCI to lead PD, with training in the participants’ domain, practice sessions, and predefined PD methods to adapt for their context. Our recommendations for future design collaborations can also provide insights to empower undergraduate students or less experienced teams and participants to benefit from participatory design efforts.