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When kids tinker in the classroom, they get to build many useful skills from computing to collaboration to creativity and more. 

Krithik Ranjan, PhD student and member of the ACME Lab, studies low-cost forms of human-computer interaction that enable more people to explore their creativity through technology. And tinkering plays a big part in that.

Ranjan presented his work at  conference in Zurich, Switzerland, which explores how constructionist ideas can inspire advancements in learning technologies and methodologies. He filled us in on what he presented.

Tell us about your research focus.

I've been trying to build ways for people to create with technology in a more open-ended, tinkering-friendly way. Tinkering is a way to learn where you can explore, you can experiment, you can playfully interact with things to learn a concept, whether it is computer science, physics, astronomy or anything like that.

Can you describe the intention behind your paper on “”?

There are two elements to it. One is the tangible side where the idea is that you're interacting with computational elements in the physical space, either stuff like paper or robots or different components that you can put together. And the other aspect is computational tinkerability, that playful open-ended aspect about creating something computationally.

I want to understand how people have previously developed design spaces, which is this concept of a framework to understand what people have done, what it means, and how we can analyze and categorize different types of projects in that space. I reviewed 33 different projects to figure out: What are kids tinkering with? What are children making? And how are they making it?

This project was from the perspective of a designer to inform future designers who are going to create such interfaces and projects.

What did you discover in conducting this research?

We figured out there is a range of how tinkerable or how expressive an interface can be, so we try to categorize that based on a “spectrum of tinkerability.” 

The other important takeaway is the idea of expanding beyond code. There's so much work, both commercially and in research, around enabling students to code. But a lot of researchers also found that this line-by-line type of programming is also a bit discouraging to students from underrepresented groups. So there's a lot of work in expanding the ways you can create with computers to not just rewrite lines of code to program or make a game or make a 3D model. But more diverse ways that suit different interests. 

Who might be the audience for this research and what might they do with it?

The goal was to categorize this space so people can refer to it and design based on that. The audience is other researchers and designers of interfaces for learning with computers. Based on the implications, they can better design ways that students learn by making [tools] more expressive, more open-ended, learner-driven, and catering to different interests instead of just code or just one type of way to interact. 

A lot of your work is focused on using simple materials that are more accessible to students all over the world. How might this research help educators expand the tools they have access to for students?

In practical situations like classrooms and formal learning centers, there are always constraints with resources, with the number of people, with the kind of things you can get access to. And quite often we might find that projects, interfaces and tools in the market are usually one-off and they are a couple hundred dollars or more. So I was trying to look at these projects in terms of the kind of materials they use and how they enable people to interact with the material.

There are some projects like [ATLAS PhD] Ruhan Yang's Paper Robots and a couple other projects that we looked at where the focus was DIY-based interfaces that educators can fabricate themselves for their classrooms. These projects stressed on publishing the plans and instructables and stuff like that online so that anybody can use them to build these interactive interfaces themselves.

And part of this was also using platforms that are already available. Arduino, Microbit and Raspberry Pi are commonly used electronic platforms in education for many different purposes. There's a way to make these interfaces more accessible if you use those existing platforms instead of making custom electronics.

How does a student who uses your Cartoonimator tool, for example, learn in the process of figuring out how to use and then make animations?

This idea of tinkering and learning by making is based on these learning philosophies of constructionism. The idea is that you're learning by building artifacts, building mental models yourself instead of being instructed by somebody else.

A big part is the idea of being stuck and then trying to work through the problem, trying to figure out what's wrong, what needs to change and get something working. This way of learning is focused on the learner's motivation.

What's next for this research?

Cartoonimator is one example where I looked at these principles about expanding beyond code and working with more accessible materials to build an interface that's open ended and tinkering-friendly for learning something like animation.

I'm looking further at how we can engage students with physical computing using paper, because that is more accessible, easier to expand on and gives you this space of creative exploration that you may not usually have with devices. 

If you're new with technology, you might be afraid of breaking something apart, but that's really a core part of tinkering, so I'm looking at how paper-based interfaces can foster the idea.