Co-Designing Learning Dashboards for Informal Educators. In Design Make Play for Equity, Inclusion, and Agency

Beheshti, E., Lyons, L., Mallavarapu, A., Thompson, W., Wallingford, B., & Uzzo, S. (2021). Co-Designing Learning Dashboards for Informal Educators. In Design Make Play for Equity, Inclusion, and Agency (pp. 61-79). Routledge.

This chapter details how a team of researchers and technology developers at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) worked with museum floor staff, program facilitators, trainers, and managers to co-develop a tablet-based digital dashboard. The dashboard is intended to help young museum floor staff, known as Explainers, facilitate NYSCI’s Connected Worlds exhibit – an immersive simulated ecosystem consisting of four biomes. The dashboard provides updated live data that Explainers can use to help visitors observe and make sense of phenomena and events that emerge when visitors interact with the exhibit. The chapter lays out the rationale and research foundations for this project and describes the design strategy, which emphasizes relationships among museum practitioners, researchers, developers, and others. It contends that this type of strategy enables participants with different understandings and agendas to build off each other’s ideas and produce designs that are both innovative and useful. The chapter also discusses the strategies used to cultivate agency among the key participants in this research-practice partnership.

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