Examining the materiality and spatiality of design scaffolds in computational making

Abstract As researchers focus more on engaging youth with advanced technologies to build computational skills, there is a need to develop tools that support youth to become creators of digital content rather than consumers of these technologies. Scholars refer to this shift in becoming creators of technology as computational making, which enables new forms of learning and thinking at the intersection of the physical and the digital. The interdisciplinary and multidimensional nature of computational making design processes means learners must negotiate their design idea across space, time, mode, and expertise. In this paper, we draw on multiple iterations of design and implementation work with wearable and locative technologies to investigate the affordances and challenges of design scaffolds in youths’ computational making design processes. We present examples from learning with electronic textiles and locative game design to illustrate the unique problem spaces of materiality and spatiality specific to computational making. Our insights highlight a significant need for sharing scholarship and design work on implementing design scaffolds in computational making contexts toward the collective goal of developing a system of design scaffolds to effectively support learners’ thinking across the interdisciplinary, multimodal problem spaces unique to computational making.