What Children Learn in Smart-Thing Design at a Distance: An Exploratory Investigation

Smart things are everywhere, from smart watches to smart toys. Children are used to them but they do not know how they are made. Engaging children in the design of smart things can help them learn of them and develop their own. Smart-thing design with children was usually held in person, in informal settings, with a learning by-doing and playful approach, and collaboratively, so as to sustain children's learning over time. Recently the COVID pandemics has made this type of design with children impossible, e.g., due to physical distancing restrictions. Smart-thing design with children has thus adapted to the mutated settings and moved at a distance. What children can learn when designing at a distance, though, remains an open question. This paper tackles such issue. It reports on at-a-distance design workshops with 20 children, aged 8-16 years old. In this paper, data are processed in relation to children's learning of smart-thing programming, before and after the workshops. Results indicate that design workshops, held at a distance, can help children learn how to program their own smart thing ideas. A significant positive correlation was also found between age and learning.