Designing Informal Knowledge Building learning spaces: Students’ Knowledge Building Design Studio

Abstract

Designing Informal Knowledge Building spaces requires intentional designs and effort. This paper presents a case study of designing a learning environment for cultivating collaborative knowledge creation with student agency for sustaining ideas. In the designbased studies, the data comes from three consecutive iterations of the students’ Knowledge Building Design Studio (sKBDS), an outofschool research program, as an immersive learning environment for knowledge building. With a sciencerelated theme, we gathered 86 elementary and secondary students (32, 32, and 22, respectively) and 1964 students’ online notes (642, 721, 601, respectively) in three iterations. The results demonstrate that students enjoyed the highlevel agency in cocreating the inquiry structure, exploring diverse ideas, and deepening their understanding, and sustaining knowledge creation in sKBDS.