Teaching 'Smart Fashion' in D&T Curriculum
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This document discusses a study that evaluated teaching resources for "Smart Fashion" - electronic textiles - within a design and technology curriculum. The researchers interviewed teachers who used the resources to understand how well the resources supported key skills and concepts. They developed a conceptual framework of computational making factors and found that the resources provided good opportunities for abstract problem solving, developing understanding of materials, and construction skills. However, opportunities for creative expression and visualizing circuits were more limited. The researchers conclude that quality resources need to support these various skills and concepts to effectively teach Smart Fashion.
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Teaching 'Smart Fashion' in D&T Curriculum
- 1. How to teach ‘Smart Fashion’ within the D&T curriculum: have we got it right? SARAH DAVIES & ALISON HARDY NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY
- 2. why we did this? INTRODUCTION 2
- 3. what do others say about teaching electronics? involves recognising the elements that structure a system, and, more important, the ways that those elements interconnect to impact each other and the overall function of a system. Peppler et al, (2013, p. 21) Constructionism ‘Objects-to-think-with’ Papert and Harel (1991) Kit of no parts Perner-Wilson and Buecheley (2013) LITERATURE 3
- 4. the resources simple circuit make a soft switch make a soft battery holder METHOD 4
- 6. what data did we use? oteaching handouts and kit components – documentary analysis ostimulated recall transcripts - interview METHOD 6
- 7. Adaptation of Rode et al (2015) computational making factors. Aesthetics young people desire to make aesthetically pleasing artefacts, however, these complex decisions can hinder a participant’s creativity; sometimes aesthetic choices override decisions about the right solution ; these aesthetic choices give young people “design agency” Creativity creativity can be a factor in problem solving within e-textiles – ‘an abstract problem solving mechanism’ and/or creativity can support free expression within e-textiles – ‘concrete and tangible skill building’ Constructing young people need the skills to be able to produce tangible objects this includes physical skills: - sewing, - soldering, - using pliers, - wire strippers and other hand-tools. acquisition of skills, impact on the young person’s realisation of artefacts from preparation to final outcome weak execution of stitching can lead to short circuits Visualising Multiple Representatives visualising 2D designs into 3D objects can be a challenge there is a need for young people to understand why they have to follow the 2D representations into real world 3D representations Understanding Materials young people need to understand how different materials operate that objects, for example crocodile clips, have the same properties as conductive thread issues associated with short circuiting CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 7
- 9. Opportunities to learn how to construct e-textiles Two of the teachers (Teacher A and D), said that these would be very helpful for developing the construction skills required to make Smart Fashion objects with learners, back in the classroom. Teacher D also identified that the conductive thread was “not easy to work with” (Line 231). FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 9
- 10. Opportunities to understand Smart Fashion Materials The teachers talked about how the coin cell positive side “curled around the edge” (Teacher A Line 180) and how this affected the position of conductive elements in the circuit. They talked about how the coin cell differed from their tradition counterpart (pen cell) and one teacher raised the need for health and safety considerations, due to the small size of the components. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 10
- 11. Opportunities to creatively problem solve, abstract problems Teachers D and A talked about how the use of the group activity made the problem solving competitive and Teacher D also acknowledged that working in teams was good for “sharing ideas and working together as a team” (Line 169) to solve abstract problems. Three teachers also identified that the problem solving activities had initially been easy and how this “built my confidence up straight away” FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 11
- 12. Opportunities to creatively express concrete solutions o opportunities for creative expression are limited across the resources. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 12
- 13. Opportunities to visually represent 2D ideas into 3D objects The teachers talk about “undoing” (Teacher C, line 69) and re-doing the circuit through the clipping and “quick to unclip” nature of the crocodile clips (Teacher E, line 31). Teacher A discusses how the LED gives her instant feedback when she says that “it is easy to see if you are doing it right or wrong because the end objective, the goal, to get the LED to light up isn’t working” (Line 168). FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 13
- 14. Opportunities to make aesthetically pleasing objects When tested with the teachers, teacher D said “it’s always nice, isn’t it, to have something physical especially when you have done it yourself” (Line 240). FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 14
- 15. what have we found out? Quality resources need to include opportunities for: • abstract problem solving, • the development of material and component understanding, • experiences in construction techniques required for this kind of hybrid activity (integrated electronics and textiles), • the visualisation of circuits, simple and advanced and • group work to support competition and team work. CONCLUSION 15
- 16. what will we do next? test the remaining resources follow up interviews with teachers develop Smart Fashion teaching resources - programming 16
- 17. further reading Buechley, L. (2006). A construction kit for electronic textiles. Wearable Computers, 2006 10th IEEE International Symposium on, 83-90. Davies, S., & Rutland, M. (2013). Did the UK digital design and technology (DD&T) programme lead to innovative curriculum change within secondary schools? Technology Education for the Future: A Play on Sustainability, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2-6 December. The Technology Environmental Science and Mathematics Education Research Centre, University of Waikato., pp. 115- 121. Kafai, Y. B., Fields, D. A., & Searle, K. A. (2014). Electronic textiles as disruptive designs: Supporting and challenging maker activities in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 532-556. Kettley, S. (2016). Designing with smart textiles. London: Fairchild Books. Ngai, G., Chan, S. C. F., Cheung, J. C. Y., & Lau, W. W. Y. (2010). Deploying a wearable computing platform for computer education. IEEE Transactions in Learning Technologies, 3(1), 45-55. Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating constructionism. In S. Papert, & I. Harel (Eds.), Constructionism (pp. 1-11) Ablex Publishing Corporation. Peppler, K., Gresalfi, M., Tekinbas, K. S., & Santo, R. (2014). Soft circuits: Crafting E-fashion with DIY electronics MIT Press. Perner-Wilson, H., & Buechley, L. (2013). Handcrafting textile sensors. In L. Buechley, K. Peppler, M. Eisenberg & Y. Kafai (Eds.), Textile messages: Dispatches from the world of e-textiles and education (pp. 55-65). Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated. Pulé, S., & McCardle, J. (2010). Developing novel explanatory models for electronics education. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 15(2) Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. Design, make, Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators, 163-181. Rode, J. A., Weibert, A., Marshall, A., Aal, K., von Rekowski, T., el Mimoni, H., & Booker, J. (2015). From computational thinking to computational making. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 239-250. Seymour, S. (2008). Fashionable technology. DE: Springer Verlag. Wilkinson, K., & Petrich, M. (2013). The art of tinkering: Meet 150 makers working at the intersection of art, science & technology REFERENCES 17
- 18. thank you for listening Sarah Davies Nottingham Trent University Burton Street Nottingham NG1 4HH +44 (0)115 8482644 Sarah.davies@ntu.ac.uk twitter: @sdsdavies Alison Hardy Nottingham Trent University Burton Street Nottingham NG1 4HH +44 (0)115 848 2198 Alsion.Hardy@ntu.ac.uk twitter: @hardy_alison 18
Editor's Notes
- Hello and welcome to our presentation. We are going to use the next 20 minutes to talk to you about a study into teaching Smart Fashion – or interactive product design.
- So first off: why did we do this? Well we work in England and as you may or may not be aware, the curriculum has been reformed with a goal of modernisation and a move for teachers to teach as multi-material specialists. Smart fashion is about the integration of electronics and computation within a garment that can be worn on the body – meaning different functionality to traditional electronics taught in school e.g. it needs to be flexible and more technologies used which include flexible conductive fabrics, thread, small component parts. So the question, how is this type of curriculum being taught in school? Well we can see that textiles teachers are promoting the convergence of electronics and textiles, however, we feel that this is limited to expensive electronic kits combined with existing textile projects e.g. lighting the eyes on an ugly doll. In conversation with one of the team from the Subject Association recently, we sensed a feeling that e-textiles undermined dominating electronics but the nature is subtler in that the electronics dominates the textiles because the concept of flexible computation is not being exploited. So we manged to get some ERDF funding to team up with a local electronic component manufacturer to design resources to improve current e-textile teaching. It is important that any resources we create have integrity and promote the concept of electronic systems within the context of fashion. This presentation is about the evaluation we undertook to test our resources quality.
- So, first we needed to identify the best way to learn the components of Smart fashion, which straight away means learning about electronic systems and how the structure of the system is dependent on the components. ….. Now this type of learning is said to be complex/abstract and difficult. This might be why our textile teachers prefer the pre-made kits option? So, we looked at the stuff Seymore Papert has written about learning computation. Constructionism and the idea of using objects to make abstract knowledge concrete. We also came across research carried out at MIT into the creation of soft components. Perner-Wilson and Buecheley (2013) refer to these as ‘a kit of no parts’ encouraging adult and teenage makers to construct switches and battery holders that expose the functionality of the materials – striping it back, so to say. This type of technology ‘laid bare’ enables learners to see what might be inside the black box, giving textile electronics an edge over traditional components.
- So from this research we created a set of resources: a simple circuit tinkering kit a multimetre activity a soft switch kit a battery holder kit a set of exemplar Smart Fashion products
- We then trialled these resources with a group of six teachers, through a professional development workshop held in April 2015
- We set up a flexible design to collect the data for this part of the bigger case study. Qualitative data was collected from three of the teaching resources and interview transcripts created during a stimulated recall session set up at the end of the work shop
- For the deductive analysis used an emerging framework from Rhodes et al. In the framework they identified five factors in successful computational making teaching with teenagers in the States: aesthetics creativity constructing visualising multiple representations and understanding materials we used the factors as codes for our analysis, recording when instances of the framework occurred and interpreting this data against the descriptions.
- We recorded instances of themes within each resource and then compared these to the teacher interviews to see how the teachers had responded to the activity. We are aware that our sample is small and so far we have only tested with teachers and not the pupils.
- From the data we can see that through the range of making skills, including the construction of pockets and encasing conductive fabric within pouches, the resources provide opportunities to support learners with the skills they need to house electronic circuit within Smart Fashion objects. However, opportunities to practice skills related to using conductive thread on the sewing machine are limited. Teacher D, identifies potential barriers to using the thread which supports the concern Ngai et al. (2010) pinpointed when describing the need to remove sewing from the initial stage of making.
- From this data we can see how the activities might provide opportunities for learners to experience and potentially understand Smart Fashion materials and components. This extends the Rode et al (2015) framework to include component understanding alongside materials. The teachers understood how the components interconnected and impacted on the circuit functionality (Peppler et al, 2013) this is essential knowledge for the types of design decisions that are required to design and make flexible Smart Fashion objects that will ultimately be worn next to the body.
- From this data we can infer that these teachers gained in confidence through the action of ‘tinkering’ (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013) with tangible objects early on. They later used step-by-step instructions, which may have modified the joy (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). Interestingly the teachers talk about the social nature of the learning provided through the group ‘tinkering’ activities.
- The teaching resources are very prescriptive in the main. Only the soft switch resource provided an extension task that gave learners a free reign over decisions, when asked to ‘think about other soft switches that you could make?’ This means that opportunities for creative expression are limited across the resources.
- This demonstrates the potential opportunities for learners to work things out in reverse (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). The resources also provide the kind of transparency identified by Parpert and Harel (1991) that provides visual feedback from the LED, to the learner.
- From this we can see that the teaching resources don’t support opportunities for the making of aesthetically pleasing objects unless the learners see the soft components as ‘aesthetically pleasing’ because they want (like the teachers) to take the objects home.
- From this study we can start to see that these teaching resources have the potential to support learners in developing an understanding of what e-textiles are and how they can be made. This understanding can then be applied, at a later date, through the designing and making of Smart Fashion products. For these teaching resources to be of quality they need to include opportunities for: abstract problem solving, the development of material and component understanding, experiences in construction techniques required for this kind of hybrid activity (integrated electronics and textiles), the visualisation of circuits, simple and advanced and group work to support competition and team work. The next steps in the research project will involve testing the remaining resources with teachers and conducting further enquiry into the social, creative and aesthetic aspects of e-textile learning.