Nathalie Bressa’s research while affiliated with Institut Polytechnique de Paris and other places

We investigate common objects as material support for programming workshops for children and adolescents in non-formal learning contexts. To this end, we engaged in a one-year participatory design process with a facilitator of programming workshops. Based on observations of workshops and interviews with the facilitator, we mapped out their artifact ecologies to investigate how the multiple artifacts and common objects were orchestrated by the facilitator and then adopted by the participants of the workshops. Building on these findings, we explored the development of a collaborative teaching tool, MicroTinker, through a participatory design process with the facilitator. This paper presents the results of our analyses and shows their constructive use to design technology in a non-formal learning setting. KeywordsArtifact ecologynon-formal learningparticipatory designprogramming education

Coding and robotics education has drawn a lot of interest in recent years to get children ready for the future labour market and advance their digital skills. This paper focuses on coding and robotics workshops in non-formal educational settings in Belgium, Denmark, and Italy. Building on data from a comparative/cross-national study, part of the broader ySKILLS project, we will present findings from 16 observations of such workshops followed by 11 interviews with the organisers and moderators with the purpose of investigating their pedagogical practices, learning and inclusion opportunities. Findings of this study suggest that while digital skills workshops in non-formal learning contexts are designed and implemented with the goal of encouraging children's collaboration and active participation, the structure of the learning activities, the organization of the learning environment, and the choices made by children themselves may promote individualistic practices. Furthermore, despite attempts to encourage diversity and inclusion, such as choosing a "free" and "open-door" approach, these workshops may fail to attract participants from diverse backgrounds. We argue that an active dialogue between organisers and moderators, researchers, parents, and, of course, children from various backgrounds is required to promote child-centered approaches that move beyond individualistic accounts of learning and toward the creation of more collaborative and inclusive digital skill activities through a systemic and holistic approach.

Situated visualization is an emerging concept within visualization, in which data is visualized in situ, where it is relevant to people. The concept has gained interest from multiple research communities, including visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI) and augmented reality. This has led to a range of explorations and applications of the concept, however, this early work has focused on the operational aspect of situatedness leading to inconsistent adoption of the concept and terminology. First, we contribute a literature survey in which we analyze 44 papers that explicitly use the term “situated visualization” to provide an overview of the research area, how it defines situated visualization, common application areas and technology used, as well as type of data and type of visualizations. Our survey shows that research on situated visualization has focused on technology-centric approaches that foreground a spatial understanding of situatedness. Secondly, we contribute five perspectives on situatedness (space, time, place, activity, and community) that together expand on the prevalent notion of situatedness in the corpus. We draw from six case studies and prior theoretical developments in HCI. Each perspective develops a generative way of looking at and working with situatedness in design and research. We outline future directions, including considering technology, material and aesthetics, leveraging the perspectives for design, and methods for stronger engagement with target audiences. We conclude with opportunities to consolidate situated visualization research.

We report on findings from seven design workshops that used ideation and sketching activities to prototype new situated visualizations - representations of data that are displayed in proximity to the physical referents (such as people, objects, and locations) to which the data is related. Designing situated visualizations requires a fine-grained understanding of the context in which the visualizations are placed, as well as an exploration of different options for placement and form factors, which existing methods for visualization design do not account for. Focusing on small displays as a target platform, we reflect on our experiences of using a diverse range of sketching activities, materials, and prompts. Based on these observations, we identify challenges and opportunities for sketching and ideating situated visualizations. We also outline the space of design activities for situated visualization and highlight promising methods for both designers and researchers.