Eva-Sophie Katterfeldt
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we report on the outcomes of the European project EduWear. The aim of the project was to develop a construction kit with smart textiles and to examine its impact on young people. The construction kit, including a suitable programming environment and a workshop concept, was adopted by children in a number of workshops.
The evaluation of the workshops showed that designing, creating, and programming wearables with a smart textile construction kit allows for creating personal meaningful projects which relate strongly to aspects of young people's life worlds. Through their construction activities, participants became more self-confident in dealing with technology and were able to draw relations between their own creations and technologies present in their environment. We argue that incorporating such constructionist processes into an appropriate workshop concept is essential for triggering thought processes about the character of digital media beyond the construction process itself.
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Index Terms
- EduWear: smart textiles as ways of relating computing technology to everyday life
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