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# Translating kindergarteners’ creative expressions into engineering specifications to design paper boats.
## Tables of Contents
5. Results and Discussion
6. Conclusions
7. References and Citations
– A 200-300 word non-technical summary of your research project.
– Questions to answer:
GUI -> RoCo -> Paper Boat
5 -> Creative Expressions = Engineering Specifications -> GUI
There are a vast amount of educational engineering kits for students in high school and college, these kits expose students to basic design, engineering, and programming concepts. But when the age group is students in primary school, the options are limited and expensive. How can we expose young children to engineering skills with little and inexpensive kits, and make sure the kits are targeted and usable for those in primary school?
A majority of students are initially exposed to STEM during their time in high school, and college. There a large amount of kits, ranging in price and complexity, that introduce students to basic design, engineering, and programming concepts. What if we could expose students to these concepts earlier?
Our goal to introduce STEM to children at an earlier age brought us to a robotic foldable boat, aka a Paper Boat. Without electrical, mechanical, and software components, only a sheet of paper is required to create a functional paper boat. This one material is widely available throughout the entire world.
We to create options for children, as young as five years old, to begin dabbling in STEM. Requirements for this project to be a success are: low cost, accessible supplies, usable for all ages, and limitless design ideas.
I spent the past nine weeks doing research on children's technology design principles. When a software or tech designer wants to make an application or tool for children, they change arbitary things that we believe will make the application/tool more usable to children. But in reality there are actual design principles software and tech designers should be aware of that will allow children to express their creativity and explore their imagination (change). I went throught literature review on children's technology, their input, and specific design principles. After I created an experimental procedure to best observe and interview children when drawing a boat, using computer and table apps and games, and drawing a boat on a computer and tablet application. This was done to best understand and move on to designing a GUI for children to use when designing a foldable paper boat.
Our work focuses on making it possible for a 5 year old to modify a paper boat, while allowing for creative expression through a widget. We use a Robot Compiler with an available interface, but the interface some familiarity of computer aided design. For this study, we will collect qualitative data from a 5 year old through: participant observation, interviews, and surveys. With sessions, we will try to carefully extract information from the user to detemine the "best" widget. The "best" widget will be determined by the widget that would allow for the largest amount of creative expression during the design and modification of a paper boat. Future work will include the design, creation, and testing of a graphical user interface for 5 year olds to design their own foldable robotic boat.
– Address the topic in the first sentence
– Introduce the topic by means of an example to illustrate theoretical
points
– Outline your general argument and your paper
## 3. Literature Review
– A discussion of findings from other researchers
– Critical apparaisal of other’s theories
• You should compare and assess other’s results.
– Provides external context for your project
– Justifies your project
## 4. Equipment and Methodology
– Details method and procdures
– Discusses the reasons for choosing your methods and procedures
Contents
– Rationale for methodological apprach
– Hypotheses
– Description of study area
– Demographic details of study population
– How the population was selected
– Description of types of data and sources
– Descrption of methods and procedures for obtaining data
– Description of methods and procedures of data analysis
For my research project, my aim is to meet with a 5 year old volunteer for at least 3 sessions. The first session would be to observe the child drawing boats using their imagination.
Session 1: The purpose would be to initially observe the child drawing boats using only their imagination. I would provide white paper, construction paper, markers, and crayons for the child to use. During the session I would start by asking the child to draw a boat. After I would begin to ask them to draw boats based on a goal, task, or objective. Ideally the session would occur within the time constraint of an hour. At the end I would ask the children questions about their experience which would include questions that are open ended for more data to be gathered, as well as short questions that would require a yes or no, easy or hard, and a fun or boring answer. (should I include an answer in the middle? )
Session 2: Test the skills of a 5 year old with computer and tablet games/apps. (May split this into 2 sessions) After I would ask the child questions like, "which game/app was your fav?", "which computer game/app did you like the most?", "" with tablet, "Which game/app was the most difficult to use?", (sepreate them into computer and tablet questions too)
Session 3: Try to build a GUI by this point and test it on them. (not 100% sure yet, need to complete more literature review (design principles))
Children and Adults have different uses and expectations of computers (desktop and/or laptop) and tablets. Adults generally user tablets for content-consumption and computers for content creation. But tablets are easier to use among children for content-consumption and content-creation because mice and keyboards are not as intuitive. (https://www.diffen.com/difference/Laptop_vs_Tablet_computer, deisgn principles)
Paper, A computer running Roco, a slider widget, a dial widget
Collected Data: Participant observation, Interviews, Surveys (one or the other, interview might be better, survey if used for a larger group and small amount of time)
Analyzing Data: Descriptive Stats, Narrative Analysis, Hermeneutic Analysis
#### The main questions these sessions should answer or provide insight to are the following:
When children are given a task, does a widget affect their execution of the task?
When children are told to modify a boat from a library, does the type of widget make it easy for them to exceute the task?
When children are told to modify a boat from a library, does the type of widget allow them to be more creative?
Session 1: make paper boat modifiable, see how volunteer modifies it
Session 2: Ask user to make modification to a boat using different widgets
Session 3: Ask user to make personal boat using widget 1
Session 4: Ask user to make personal boat using widget 2
## 5. Results and Discussion
R
– Details the main findings
– Provides a summary explaination of results
– Accept or reject hypotheses if you have any
D
– Develop a logical argument about what your results mean.
– Your results provide evidence to illustrate and support your
argument.
– Identify potential errors--What might invalidate your results? How
might you improve research design?
## 6. Conclusions
– A restatement of the research problem
– A summary statement of main findings and their significance.
– Shortcomings of the research
– Agenda for future research
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Laptop_vs_Tablet_computer
https://www.wikihow.com/Do-Qualitative-Research