Great question! While designing the technology for the project we had meetings with parents about once a month. Each of the meetings were structured differently and included group brainstorming sessions, various design approaches (e.g. layered elaboration), and semi-structured interviews.

We’ve detailed our co-design process in a CHI paper that can be reached at this link (Dr. Yip’s website): http://bigyipper.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04...

Thanks Sarah for your comment. You can learn more about the project and our findings in the papers at the bottom of our project website: hcil.umd.edu/science-everywhere/

The major focus of this project is to use technology to connect learning in informal and formal spaces. So parents and kids use Science Everywhere at home, at after-school programs, and some use it in their classrooms. We haven’t written a paper yet on these connected practices, but we hope to understand how technology (e.g. social media designed for science learning, large interactive displays that support collaborative sensemaking) can bridge normal everyday experiences with science in the classroom. Because it is a design-based research project, many of the specific design features have been (and are still being) co-developed with our participants. Hopefully we will have more on the technology/design in a paper soon!

We are actually coding the data from the app right now to address this very question! And yes, the kids do engage in science and engineering practices when they post, but to most people it may not sound like it. Because Science Everywhere is a social media application we see a mixing of peer culture (e.g. slang, chatting) with science practices – so the discourse surrounding science is less academic sounding but very still very apparent.

Thanks! We are running the project in two locations – one on the east coast and one on the west coast. In the east coast group we are meeting with about 30 kids weekly and we also work with their parents. The kids are elementary and middle school age (with some high schoolers) because we work with several kids from the same families. We only have one community center and we work with a middle school that a majority of our participants attend. When we roll out the interactive displays in the middle school our participant pool will dramatically change because all of the kids at the school will be allowed to join and use the app.