Fostering civic engagement through native maps: a preliminary study

School mission statements promising to transform students into leaders have become commonplace. Yet there appears to be a disconnect between educational practices and their application to real challenges pertaining to students' communities and to society as a whole. This gap results in a low sense of agency and presents an opportunity to develop tools that foster informed civic engagement and participation. In this paper, we describe a participatory design study conducted with high schoolers from multiple cities in California, USA. After four months, researchers and students developed an interactive map-based tool to weave narratives of local participation and lead adolescents to act upon their neighborhoods' challenges. By manipulating map layers, students were able to augment physical spaces and learned to conceive critical stories about their surroundings. Our preliminary results show that the context of use, sustained interest, and motivation are key factors of success. We finish this article by describing the upcoming steps of our work.