Title: FA2022: Maker Movement in Higher Education (Yoojin Bae)
Author Name: Yoojin Bae
Selected Case (Published Article):
Worsley, M. & Bar-El, D. (2022) Inclusive Making: designing tools and experiences to promote accessibility and redefine making, Computer Science Education, 32(2), 155-187, DOI: 10.1080/08993408.2020.1863705
1. Introduction
The maker movement has received a lot of attention as an education that promotes students’ creativity, and the core of maker education is the activities in that students create their own crafts to solve a particular real-world problem. To do that, learners need to access various digital fabrication tools which people with disability may have some difficulties utilizing. As a result, in the case of students with disabilities it has been excluded due to accessibility problems of tools and activities for making, which are essential activities of maker education. Research is required to design and develop tools and activities related to making so that learners with disabilities can access maker education.
2. Overview of the Case
The context of the selected case is Inclusive Making at the university level; the authors developed a course that aims to explore making as a field for democratization and develop and design artifacts for inclusive making. This study examines students’ motivation for enrolling in a class on accessibility and making and what students learned and practiced from the inclusive making course.
According to the paper, teaching accessibility is underestimated within computer science. Based on the 1998 U.S. Section 508 Amendment and Ethics and Social Responsibility, adding accessibility-related content to computer science classes has been discussed and recommended, but there are very few cases that are actually implemented. Scholars in the field of HCI within computer science are conducting related research, and according to their research results, students’ awareness of accessibility is improved through design classes that emphasize accessibility requirements, and they come to have a sense of responsibility for it.
This study applies ethnocomputing to the disability community to (a) seek to capture students’ interest in accessibility in the context of higher education, (b) extend the discussion of accessibility to makers as a whole process, not accessibility to tools, and (c) extend disability rights beyond legal requirements on accessibility, and (d) give students to opportunity to participate in the criticism of making and accessibility, it was intended to induce students to understand accessibility issues more deeply. As a result, the discussion of this study can be applied to other making focused courses and applied or theoretical computer science.
3. Solutions Implemented
The inclusive making course is founded on three primary literature backgrounds: making, User-Centered Design, and critical disability studies. The authors adopted papers by scholars who studied key ideas related to making and accessibility as class reading materials (See Table 1), and developed a taxonomy to promote discussion activities. The taxonomy consists of seven categories: (a) Technological, (b) Social, (c) Cultural, (d) Economic, (e) Political, (f) Pedagogical, and (g) Informational.
In Inclusive making class activities, students collaborate with peers on hands-on projects, apply design techniques, or engage in discussions of guidance literature. In particular, since students wear blindfolds or earplugs while carrying out these activities, they can easily experience indirectly working together with people with disabilities. There are three out-of-class assignments: (a) volunteering at a local organization that works for accessibility, (b) visiting two or more makerspaces, and (c) communicating with someone that has an impairment. After the experiences, students are requested to submit a short reflection paper which can help develop their ideas for final projects.
In addition, through group projects over the semester, students should submit three projects based on three design provocations: (a) Navigating a makerspace through the senses, (b) Beyond Vision, (c) Upgrading. Or students should design a technology or a set of activities based on a local organization’s specific needs about accessibility with the local organization’s members.
4. Outcomes
Regarding the first research question of this study, “What motivations do students have for enrolling in a class on accessibility and making?”, various responses were reported. The authors classified responses into seven categories (see table 2), which are as follows: (a) Individual Awareness and Learning, (b) Making, (c) Social Good, (d) Identity, (e) Interdisciplinarity, (f) Course Format, and (g) Degree Requirements. The authors found that students’ responses were linked to their experience and identity components.
Students’ projects fall into three categories: (a) multimodal interfaces for designing (Figure 1, 2, 3, 4), (b) tools or experiences that raise awareness, and (c) projects that aim to redefine making (Figure 5). Projects in the first category aimed at designing interfaces for people with disabilities to participate in making. Projects in the second category exhibit the scalability of the first category in terms of raising awareness of accessibility. Projects in the last category sought to redefine what making meant to a particular community.
5. Implications
Researchers and practitioners who are particularly interested in teaching accessibility in computer science can apply the following three implications to their works. First, making can be used as an opportunity to close the gap between learners on a different spectrum. Maker education has been thought to be inevitably excluding students with disabilities due to the special nature of its education (Bar-EI & Worsley, 2021). However, through maker education that emphasizes accessibility, it is possible to check how maker education can be applied to students with disabilities. Second, students can have learning opportunities to apply a critical lens to computer science while participating in projects related to accessibility. Students can experience different values that others might have and expand their perspectives of various people through the projects. In particular, when such a critical lens is applied in projects in computer science, it can lead to developing items considering diversity (Vandenberghe et al., 2022). Last, in interdisciplinary learning, clear guidelines should be provided to students. Just as students linked making and accessibility based on the taxonomy developed in the case study, clear guidance can play a role in activating students’ discussions and expanding their ideas (Wang et al., 2022).
Based on the above implications, it is possible to create an inclusive and future-oriented learning environment on how to apply their knowledge and skills by effectively educating students about accessibility in inclusive making courses.
Reference
Bar-El, D., & Worsley, M. (2021). Making the maker movement more inclusive: Lessons learned from a course on accessibility in making. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 29, 100285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100285
Vandenberghe, B., Gerling, K., Geurts, L., & Vanden Abeele, V. (2022). Maker Technology and the Promise of Empowerment in a Flemish School for Disabled Children. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 546, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501853
Wang, D., Luo, L., Luo, J., Lin, S., & Ren, G. (2022). Developing Computational Thinking: Design-Based Learning and Interdisciplinary Activity Design. Applied Sciences, 12(21), 11033. https://doi.org/10.3390/app122111033