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Some reflections on designing construction kits for kids

Published: 08 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present ten guiding principles for designing construction kits for kids, informed by our experiences over the past two decades:* Design for Designers* Low Floor and Wide Walls* Make Powerful Ideas Salient -- Not Forced* Support Many Paths, Many Styles* Make it as Simple as Possible -- and Maybe Even Simpler* Choose Black Boxes Carefully* A Little Bit of Programming Goes a Long Way* Give People What They Want -- Not What They Ask For* Invent Things That You Would Want to Use Yourself* Iterate, Iterate -- then Iterate AgainWhile these principles apply especially to the development of construction kits, we believe that they could be useful for everyone who designs new technologies for kids.

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Papert, S. (1993). The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Basic Books. New York.
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Papert, S. (2000). What's the big idea: Towards a pedagogy of idea power. IBM Systems Journal, vol. 39, no. 3--4.
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Resnick, M., Rusk, N., and Cooke, S. (1998). The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City. In Schon, D., Sanyal, B., and Mitchell, W. (eds.), High Technology and Low-Income Communities, pp. 266--286. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
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Resnick, M., Berg, R., and Eisenberg, M. (2000). Beyond Black Boxes: Bringing Transparency and Aesthetics Back to Scientific Investigation. Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 7--30.
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Resnick, M., Kafai, Y., Maeda, J., et al. (2003). A Networked, Media-Rich Programming Environment to Enhance Technological Fluency at After-School Centers in Economically-Disadvantaged Communities. Proposal to the National Science Foundation (funded 2003--2007). http://www.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/scratch.pdf
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cover image ACM Other conferences
IDC '05: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Interaction design and children
June 2005
128 pages
ISBN:1595930965
DOI:10.1145/1109540
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 June 2005

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  1. construction kits
  2. design
  3. education
  4. learning
  5. metadesign

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IDC05
IDC05: Interaction Design and Children
June 8 - 10, 2005
Colorado, Boulder

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