Maker Cards: Evaluating design cards for teaching physical computing to middle-school girls

Abstract

The maker movement holds strong promise for enabling children to participate in empowering learning experiences through technology. Many researchers have identified different approaches to address making for children and educational approaches on teaching beginners to program. However, these educational approaches require strong supervision, or step-by-step instruction on how to program certain tasks, which limit children in their creative expressiveness. Therefore, we designed Maker Cards as a card-based teaching approach using the new physical computation device Calliope to give the children instructions for the hardware and software, that help them make their own meaningful artifacts. We evaluated Maker Cards with 54 girls (aged 10 - 14) in several workshops. Our evaluation shows that Maker Cards were valuable for the participants in getting started to implement their own ideas because they were able to find the sensors, connect the external sensors and actuators as well as use the program examples as reference. Furthermore, the Maker Cards cover common questions, allowing them to work independently.