My:Talkies Craft Kit, 2021-2022

Jin Yu, Sherry Hsi, Seth Van Doren, HyunJoo Oh

My:Talkies: Designing a Craft Kit to Support Learning about Communication Devices through Making, IDC 2022: DOI PDF

My:Talkies is a hands-on learning kit intended to introduce basic concepts of communication devices in out-of-school learning environments. In designing My:Talkies, we aimed to make the kit: (1) age-appropriate for youth (ages 11-14), (2) low-cost to serve a large number of youth, (3) tinkerable to encourage exploratory construction, and (4) expressive to invite creative storytelling. Our goal is to address the central research question: How can we design a kit to support children’s learning through making about communication devices for out-of-school learning environments? To investigate this, we conducted a pilot study with eight children where we investigated what they could make with My:Talkies kit prototype. We evaluated the kit through expert reviews with ten out-of-school educators.