Bringing Teachers and Researchers Together through Participatory Design and Cooperative Prototyping in Computing Education

Abstract

Computing education is becoming increasingly important in high school curricula, but there are challenges in teaching computing, including teachers' professional development and the development of appropriate learning tools. Participatory design and cooperative prototyping offer opportunities for identifying challenges in computing education and ways for teachers to be involved in the design of new learning tools. This study describes the process of codesigning a learning tool to overcome some of these challenges for computing education in high school, involving teachers, developers, and researchers as collaborators. The study investigating how cooperative prototyping and participatory design can lead to mutual learning about challenges in teaching computing. We prototyped learning activities and the learning tool, CoTinker, in collaboration between six teachers, two developers, and four researchers in four subcases and implemented them in classrooms with a total of 83 students. We show how challenges such as students' collaboration and transfer of knowledge in computing education were overcome by applying the prototypes in computing education classrooms in high school.