Designing creative activities for children

Abstract

Creative activities for children have drawn great interest in the last years. The advent of programming languages for children (i.e., Scratch) combined with accessible programmable hardware platforms (i.e., Arduino) makes it possible for children to engage in creative development of digital artifact, like robots and interactive installations. However, there are limited studies towards the design and improvement of these activities. The goal of this study is to provide validated knowledge about the trade-off between collaboration and control throughout creative programming activities. To this end, a group of researchers and artists designed and implemented two workshop programs of a total of 51 pupils, exploring their experiences with open source software. The workshops were based on Reggio Emilia philosophy of creative reuse and the open-source software Scratch. Qualitative and quantitative approaches of the research are based on data collected through interviews, surveys and observations. The results of this paper argue that: (a) collaboration among children improves the value of the workshops, (b) however big groups lead children to lose the control over their actions during the workshop, and (c) children's control significantly affects workshop's usefulness.