In the last 2 months, Maria Santos and I carried out several workshops to inspire teenagers in digital fabrication. One workshop was held in April at the American Space Barcelona and focused particularly on a critical reflection upon how technology influenced our personal lives. In June we also participated in the Oracle4Girls which aimed to attrack and retain girls in STEM and we conducted a second workshop in this line.
I am please to invite you to my talk “Participative Design Strategies for Full-Body Interaction” on Wednesday, 8th March 2017 at 15.00, Wiener Building 028, 030, 032, Aarhus University.
Abstract:
The design for Full-Body Interaction Learning Environments faces two main challenges. First, the need to define learning contents that are aligned with users’ understanding and that are suitable for the features of Full-Body Interaction. Second, research based on the embodied cognition framework proposes the use of physicality and spatiality to promote learning. Nevertheless, currently employed methods to involve users in the design of Full-Body Interaction Learning Environments often neglect to properly integrate the notion of body and space. In this talk, Marie will present a set of participative design strategies to tackle these challenges. The audience will be invited to participate in a dialogue about potentials and limitations of the presented design strategies and to think about the physical instance of a Full-Body Interaction design kit. Furthermore, we will discuss and reflect upon how this approach could be relevant for general design practices and applied to related research areas.
More information about the research project can be found here: https://www.upf.edu/web/evaluation-driven-design/
Together with Maria Santos, I organized a STEM workshop at the American Space Hackathon and Youth Innovation Day in Barcelona in which children learned about conductivity and how to programm mini-games through hands-on activities with Scratch and the microcontroller Makey Makey.
Together with Laura Malinverni, I participated in the Campus Junior event “La universidad y yo” at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. We invited teenagers to explore possibilities of rethinking and changing learning spaces through the use of a mixed reality system. During a brainstorming activity, the participants reflected upon which learning spaces had caught their attention and how they would like them to “transform”. After that, they created first their own ideas for graffitis with pencil and paper. The graffitis were then digitalized and the teenagers explored their application in relation to the physical space of the university campus.
This evening I discussed together with Cecilia Tham (Makers of Barcelona), Nuria Mir (GFT IT Consulting), Elena Panizza (AdMojo), Eugenia Gargallo (Inspira’t), Marta Verde Baqueiro and Ana Freire (Universitat Pompeu) in a town hall discussion future goals and practices to move toward leadership equality. The event was sponsored by IED Barcelona and WebVisions.
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GirlsInLab is an organization of volunteers in Barcelona which offers free educational and hands-on STEM workshops and tutorials for young girls to promote their interest in technology and in pursuing STEM-related careers.
On 29th November 2015, I participated as volunteer at the UPF Hackathon for girls between 7 and 17 years.
This video shows how the girls learnt to program and to create their own ideas with Scratch, robotics, AppInventor, Drawbots, 3D design, 3D printing and Makey Makey.
(You can get an impression of my Scratch Jr workshop from 0:58 min.)
