My:Talkies: Designing a Craft Kit to Support Learning about Communication Devices through Making

Abstract

My:Talkies is a tangible learning kit for teaching basic concepts of communication devices through expressive making with children (ages 11-14). The My:Talkies prototype comprises of a pair of two paper templates for embodying the communication entities, micro:bit boards, and paper potentiometers for analog to digital encoding. Through pilot studies with eight children and expert review sessions with ten out-of-school educators, we report the design affordances of our prototype and implications of design for future revisions. We found that the kit supported youth in learning through making with personal narratives to grasp abstract concepts such as transmitter/receiver and encoding/decoding. In the expert review, out-of-school educators positively evaluated that the kit is easy to use, good for teaching communication devices, and recommendable to others. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future work informed by observation from the pilot study and design suggestions from the educators.