Facilitating Computational Tinkering

Team Members: Ricarose Roque, Ronni Hayden, Celeste Moreno, Stephanie Hladik (alum)

Collaborators: Our project collaborators include the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium and the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab as well as their local partner sites: the Clubhouse Network and the Tinkering Afterschool Network. Our group, Creative Communities, is working locally with ideaLABs at Denver Public Library.

Facilitating Computational Tinkering is a collaborative project that aims to engage youth and families in out-of-school spaces like museums, libraries, and community centers in creative and equitable learning experiences where they can create and express themselves with computing. We work closely with educators and facilitators in these spaces to co-design experiences and activities at their spaces, and to support them professional development opportunities that amplify their capacities to engage their communities in computational tinkering experiences. We believe that tinkering-based approaches to learning and creating with computational tools in combination with equitable facilitation practices can support nondominant youth and families in feeling welcome and valued in computing spaces.

Relevant resources and publications

• Newsletter: Tinkering Together

• Blog Post: "Animating our Worlds" with code for Computer Science Education Week 2021

• Blog Post: Facilitating Facilitators: Supporting Facilitators as Learners of Facilitation

• Blog Post: Making Faces, Animating with Code, and Tinkering with Facilitation: Our ASTC Conference Workshop with Museum Educators

• Tinkering Studio Learning Dimensions Framework

• Facilitating Fundamentals from Family Creative Learning

• Moreno, C. & Roque, R. (2023) Revealing the Tuning Practices of Creative Learning Experience Designers. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of Creativity and Cognition (C&C ‘23). (Pg. 529–540) Virtual.

• Hayden, R., Hladik, S., & Roque, R. (2023) Expanding and focusing infrastructuring analysis for informal STEM education. In Proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS ‘23) Conference. (PDF)

• Hladik et al. (2022) “Examining Equity in Facilitation of Tinkering and Making in STEAM” Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Japan

• Moreno, C., Hladik, S., Roque, R., & Hayden, R. (2022, Accepted). Challenges in Facilitating Computational Experiences in Informal Learning Environments. Connected Learning Summit 2022.

• Roque, R. and Jain, R. (2018). Becoming facilitators of creative computing in out-of-school settings. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences. London

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005764.