Kylie A. Peppler

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Informatics

Commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, this book explores research indicating that youth are learning new ways to engage in the arts on their own time and according to their own interests. Digital technologies, such as production tools and social media, allow youth to create and share their art. Kylie Peppler urges educators and policy makers to t...

Incorporating novel, cross-disciplinary technologies such as e-textiles in computing education can broaden participation, particularly by women, and improve learning outcomes.

The experiences of children learning through multimodal production and interactive computer programming have been well documented and include accounts of youth from diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. However, little attention has been paid to the role of creative technology use by children with cognitive disabiliti...

This exploratory study compares how young people (ages 15–16) learn circuitry concepts and layout design principles important to electrical engineering using one of two educational circuitry toolkits: paper circuits and traditional solderless breadboards. Paper-based prototyping kits are representative of a trend that incorporates new materials and...

Out-of-school time (OST) makerspaces are spaces for youth to engage in exploratory practices and deepen STEM interests in personally meaningful ways. Many youth—especially teens—additionally benefit from supportive relationships (e.g., caring adult mentors, peer mentors) in these spaces to help them uncover their interests and translate them into l...

Purpose Science museums provide a context for developing and testing engineering activities that support visitors in creating personally meaningful objects. This study aims to propose that narrative design elements in such engineering activities can foster empathy to support engineering engagement among girls ages 7–14. Design/methodology/approach...

The move to remote learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic presented design challenges for teaching and learning. Though research is emerging on teacher adaptation during the pandemic that documents challenges and the perspectives of stakeholders, the field is lacking close descriptive accounts that illustrate what classrooms looked and felt...

Augmented reality (AR) is a unique, hands-on tool to deliver information. However, its educational value has been mainly demonstrated empirically so far. In this paper, we present a modeling approach to provide users with mastery of a skill, using AR learning content to implement an educational curriculum. We illustrate the potential of this approa...

Traditional reviews of arts education have focused on why the arts are valuable for learning, but the arts’ contributions to cross-disciplinary discourse remain undertheorized. In this article, we provide a theoretical review of the arts and learning to suggest a new way of thinking about how the arts contribute to learning across disciplines throu...

Purpose This paper aims to explore what design aspects can support data visualization literacy within science museums. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative study thematically analyzes video data of 11 visitor groups as they engage with reading and writing of data visualization through a science museum exhibition that features real-time and...

As an emerging field of theory, research, and practice, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) has received attention for its efforts to incorporate the arts into the rubric of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning. In particular, many informal educators have embraced it as an inclusive and authe...

The learning sciences, informed by a diversity of fields such as cognitive science, anthropology, education, and sociology, has a long history with design while engaging in the study of learning in real-world, non-simplified contexts. From its genesis approximately thirty years ago, the learning sciences as a field has grown to encompass the study...

Establishing what constitutes creativity in a domain is something for which we often look to experts—individuals versed in a domain’s history and able to identify timeworn ideas from fresh ones. Such valuations of creative merit are tied to a familiarity with past and present trends and, therefore, opinions of newcomers are often ignored. However,...

Effective adoption of online platforms for teaching, learning, and skill development is essential to both academic institutions and workplaces. Adoption of online learning has been abruptly accelerated by COVID19 pandemic, drawing attention to research on pedagogy and practice for effective online instruction. Online learning requires a multitude o...

Prior literature has begun to demonstrate that even young children can learn about complex systems using participatory simulations. This study disentangles the impacts of third-person perspectives (offered by traditional simulations) and first-person perspectives (offered by participatory simulations) on children’s development of such systems think...

The maker movement advocates hands-on making with emerging technologies because of its value for promoting innovative and personally meaningful transdisciplinary learning. Educational research has focused on settings that primarily serve youth from dominant groups, yet we know surprisingly little about making among minoritized youth and the kinds o...

Youth portfolios are curated collections of projects that highlight learning across settings over time. Key challenges for harnessing portfolios in broader assessment efforts include the need to better understand what motivates youth to create portfolios and how to leverage these motivations widely. Building on sociocultural approaches, this articl...

Objective: This study examines the validity of Amabile’s (1982) consensual assessment technique in measuring creativity in a warm-up activity in fourth-grade drama classrooms and compares the scores between warm-ups occurring in a blackbox theater setting (experimental) vs. a traditional classroom (control). Method: Four professional actors viewed...

Making is a playful exploration of tools and materials to design personally meaningful artifacts, providing a particularly impactful entry point for traditionally underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. However, it remains unclear how these constructionist explorations translate to eventual profess...

While circuitry lessons have traditionally been first introduced in late elementary school, they remain challenging conceptually for undergraduates in physics and engineering courses. Seeking to provide a higher quality and earlier introduction to circuitry learning for young children (ages 3–5), this paper investigates the affordances of utilizing...

Connected learning explains how people can build learning pathways that connect their interests, relationships, and formal learning to lead toward future opportunities such as careers. However, most learning systems are not set up ideally for connected learning; for instance, most schools still teach disciplines as discrete units that do not connec...

Recent efforts at improving K-12 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education emphasize the importance of learning STEM through engaging in the epistemic practices of STEM. These practices, identified in both the Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards, highlight ways in which scientific or mathematics concepts,...

Celebrating hands‐on making and technological inventiveness, the Maker Movement promotes the popularity of new makerspaces: learning environments filled with diverse materials for youth’s creative projects. Described as “constructionist learning environments,” makerspaces can be challenging to design because materials require substantial budgetary...

The lack of engagement and real-world applications and contexts in regular mathematics classrooms contribute to the potential avoidance of mathematics. Design Math (DM) was a set of yearlong collaborative project-based learning activities to support the learning of middle-school geometry curriculum through design, modeling, and sewing of fabric-bas...

Two approaches to materiality (i.e. mediated discourse and agential realism) are compared to explore their usefulness in tracking literacies in action and artefacts produced during a play and design activity in a preschool makerspace. Mediated discourse analysis has relied on linguistic framing and social semiotics to make sense of multimodality. C...

Recent advances in arts education policy, as outlined in the latest National Core Arts Standards, advocate for bringing digital media into the arts education classroom. The promise of such Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)–based approaches is that, by coupling Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) an...

Despite its grounding in creativity techniques, merging multiple source sketches to create new ideas has received scant attention in design literature. In this paper, we identify the physical operations that in merging sketch components. We also introduce cognitive operations of reuse, repurpose, refactor, and reinterpret, and explore their relevan...

Abstract Design protocol analysis is a technique to understand designers’ cognitive processes by analyzing sequences of observations on their behavior. These observations typically use audio, video, and transcript data in order to gain insights into the designer’s behavior and the design process. The recent availability of sophisticated sensing tec...

In this chapter, we discuss the design decisions made when creating the game mechanics and rules for BioSim, a pair of game-like participatory simulations centered around honeybees and army ants to help young children (ages kindergarten through third grade) explore complex systems concepts. We outline four important design principles that helped us...

This case study considers how educational researchers and practitioners can work together to engage in participatory knowledge building, a process rooted in both empirical research and the lived practices and expertise of on-the-ground educators that produces knowledge relevant to both educational theory and practice. The method shared was used as...

After reading the title you may think that Pennsylvanians, or at least the writers of this article, have a fixation on alliteration! Pre figuration translates to a future imagined by a group, and the authors think that makerspaces can play a part in that future. e reality is that we believe there is a lot career and technical education ( �) can lea...

Purpose This article makes a case for the importance of brokering future learning opportunities to youth as a programmatic goal for informal learning organizations. Such brokering entails engaging in practices that connect youth to events, programs, internships, individuals and institutions related to their interests to support them beyond the wind...

Purpose This article makes the case that the education community can learn from professional learning and innovation practices, collectively called “Working in the Open” (or “Working Open”), that have roots in the free/open source software (F/OSS) movement. These practices focus on values of transparency, collaboration and sharing within communitie...

While here is ample research on how youth are connected in online spaces and how youth participate online via sharing and reviewing artifacts, yet less is known about how these social connections and contributions emerge, especially in the context of physical making and what can they contribute to learning and assessment. Thus, our symposium primar...

In this chapter, we describe a preschool maker project that illustrates the potential of Design Playshop, a model we developed to support playful and expanded learning in makerspaces, communities of makers creating with materials in a physical place (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). Using Squishy Circuits kits (Johnson & Thomas, 2010), we created a pre...

Committed to helping youth develop powerful ways of seeing and acting in the world, learning scientists and educators came together in 2010–2013 to imagine how to support production-centered ways of engaging in systems thinking. Conceived as a collaborative design research project between Indiana University, DePaul University, the Institute of Play...

Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended ta...

Daskolia, Kynigos and Makri's article ofers us a view into potential applications of constructionist learning theory to help students conceive of and collaborate on solutions to today's complex problems. This work in many ways parallels the efforts of those investigating systems thinking and highlights the importance of digital production in that p...

Building from our previous work we explore HandiMate, a robotics kit which enables users to construct and animate their toys using everyday craft materials [32]. The kit contains eight joint modules , a tablet interface and a glove controller. Unlike popular kits, HandiMate does not rely on manufactured parts to construct the toy. Rather this open...

This paper looks at the creative design process in making electronic or e-textiles. E-textile artifacts were first evaluated for creativity using the Consensual Assessment Technique. By comparing the design processes of artifacts with high and low creativity scores, we draw inferences about the creative design process. Deductive coding using themes...

The authors propose and discuss their Playshop curricular model, which they developed with teachers. Their studies suggest a playful approach supports even more rigor than the Common Core State Standards require for preschool and early grade children. Children keep their attention longer when learning comes in the form of something they can play wi...

Since summer of 2013, Hive Research Lab (HRL), an applied research partner of Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network, has engaged in a range of activities that include both basic research and applied design activities geared toward advancing the community’s collective understanding of how to support youth interest-driven learning pathways. Our activitie...

The combination of technological progress and a growing interest in design has promoted the prevalence of DIY (Do It Yourself) and craft activities. We introduce HandiMate, a platform that makes it easier for people without technical ex-pertise to fabricate and animate electro-mechanical systems from everyday objects. Our goal is to encourage creat...

The recent emergence of digital creativity that extends beyond the screen and into the physical world, engendering new forms of creative production, has transformed educational and professional fields. From AT&T's bio-tracking clothing to Lady Gaga's smart-hydraulic "Living Dress," e-textiles infuse fashion with electronics to produce unique and ae...

The Maker movement promotes hands-on making, including crafts, robotics, and computing. The movement’s potential to transform education rests in our ability to address notable gender disparities, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. E-textiles—the first female-dominated computing community—provide inspiration fo...

Amid the high-stakes testing environments in today's schools, we argue that high-quality arts integration positively influences student academic achievement. Drawing on a longitudinal study of an intensive multi-art integration model implemented in public elementary schools in the Los Angeles area, we found consistent and significant gains in stude...

As a learning network, Hive NYC is continually in the process of understanding what its potential is, what its purposes could be, and how organizations can achieve more together than they could apart. Within that, it’s imperative that we think about how we can be ‘a network that learns’, a community that is continually generating, circulating and a...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

This article reports on the practice and evaluation of a music education model, In Harmony, which utilizes new technologies and current theories of learning to mediate the music learning experience. In response to the needs of twenty-first century learners, the educational software programs Teach, Learn, Evaluate! and Impromptu served as central co...

How social media and DIY communities have enabled new forms of political participation that emphasize doing and making rather than passive consumption. Today, DIY—do-it-yourself—describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt's “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to repurpo...

In common attempts to standardize what and how teaching is conducted, we often fail to recognize the tremendous amount of innovation that educators bring to solving an array of challenges in today’s classrooms. This volume highlights compelling firsthand counter-narratives from educators engaged in exactly this work, underscoring the fact that toda...

In this chapter, we consider how students' and adults' work with electronic textiles can expand our understanding of "transparency"-revealing power structures and constraints in the design and use of new media-a ore idea promoted in participatory media and critical design. Electronic textiles (e-textiles), which include young people's design of pro...

Making and maker communities are at the cutting edge of social and economic innovation; participatory media encompasses civic and interest driven ways to create and communicate. This session explores the different potentialities afforded by making and using digital media for young people across a range of learning contexts (formal, out of school, c...