In small-scale design research projects, researchers often take on many different roles: designers of artifacts or activities, co-present participants, and analysts of video documentation. There are some obvious risks with one person fulfilling many different roles in a project: A designer may be biased towards her own design proposals, and have difficulties distinguishing between the actual form of the prototype and the intentions behind it. In addition, adopting dual roles as both protagonist and video analyst creates risks for biased interpretations. Referring to examples of fieldwork in educational settings, a conceptual division between design and enactment is proposed as a tool for mapping out and disentangling the different roles of a design researcher in a small-scale project.

Hur rör sig blicken när vi tittar på bilder? Vid Lunds universitet studerar man just det genom att låta försökspersoner titta på illustrationer av Sven Nordqvist och Christina Alvner. Forskaren och tecknaren Åsa Harvard Maare ger ett illustratörsperspektiv på ögonrörelseforskning och spekulerar kring vilken roll bildmaterialet spelar för dessa studier.

Constrained by national tests and the mathematics curriculum, teachers have problems finding time for exploratory and hands-on mathematical activities, especially so in classes with a reduced pace of progression, for example because of a large proportion of second-language learners. Could the leisure-time center, where time is not earmarked, provide such opportunities? The conclusion of this thesis is that this can be done, on the condition that designed activities build on the central premise of the leisure-time center: children have the right to choose which activities to engage with. The thesis is interdisciplinary, combining design research, situated cognition/embodied interaction, and pedagogy. The empirical material comes from a design project conducted in collaboration with the Rook, a multicultural school with an integrated leisure-time center. The participating children were 7-9 years old. The games studied were card and board games, especially combinatorial mathematics games (Set and Nim). The situated and embodied approach towards design is reflected in the analysis, which approaches visual artifacts as parts of multimodal communicative scenes with many co-present participants engaged in playing games or solving problems. It is shown that children learn the game through observation and participation, either as players or in non- playing roles. For many games, rules are written in a format that is inaccessible to children. One of the design tasks in the project has been to develop secondary artifacts related to games: graphic guides, conceptual maps, and paper-based exercises that can be used by children without adult support. The premise of the learners’ right to choose has many consequences for the design of learning activities. One is that motivation changes from being a property of the learner to a property of the activity. In order to highlight this difference, this thesis proposes the notions of learnability and learnworthiness to describe those aspects of an activity and its context which make it motivating from the learner’s perspective. The thesis concludes with a discussion of how design can increase the learnability and learnworthiness of a learning activity. Watching the activity being practiced is the most important resource for potential participants to determine its learnability and learnworthiness. The qualities determining the learnworthiness of an activity are reciprocity, mastery, and the potential for closure. Watching a peer successfully solving a task increases the learnability for the observers as well. If problem-solvers think aloud and use their hands to move or point at cards, collaboration and learning by observers is facilitated. Providing games with non-competitive side activities creates opportunities for deliberate practice, and offers a safe entry for children who are reluctant to engage as players.

My presentation is about multimodal communication between players of a card game, and how the playing cards as visual artifacts are used for communication, in combination with other modalities such as talk or gesture. The purpose of the study is to support the design of educational games through a better understanding of the relation between visual artifacts and observational learning. I have video-recorded children engaged in playing the game Set1 in a Swedish leisure-time center, and excerpts of the video recordings have been analyzed in order to describe how players communicate and coordinate with each other. Playing Set involves establishing areas with different functions: the display with cards to combine into sets, the construction area where a player matches cards, and stacks of found sets for each player or team of players. These areas, and their placement, reflect the state of the game: who plays with whom, and who is in turn to act. Unlike talk or gesture, visual arrangements of objects remain visible, and thereby available as a resource for further actions of participants (Streeck 2011). Communications about how to play the game are often produced by acting on or attending to the playing cards: protecting cards from intruders, or pushing a card towards another player. From the point of view of design, it is important to follow how visual artifacts in combination with participants’ bodies define the visual scene and constrain what parts of the game that are visible to participants (Goodwin 2000). There is no clear boundary between players and observers: those who stand behind the players and watch are learning as well, which make them part of the target group for educational game design.

This paper looks at how players of a card game create spatial arrangements of playing cards, and the cognitive and communicative effects of such arrangements. The data is an episode of two 8-year old children and a teacher playing the combinatorial card game Set, in the setting of the leisure-time center. The paper explores and explains how the visual resources of the game are used for externalizing information in terms of distributed cognition and epistemic actions. The paper also examines how other participants attend to the visual arrangements and self-directed talk of the active player. The argument is that externalizing information may be a strategy for reducing cognitive load for the individual problem-solver, but it is also a communicative behaviour affecting other participants and causing them to engage with the problem and the problem-solver. Seeing and hearing players who have succeeded in finding a set provide observers with rich learning opportunities, and increases their motivation to play the game. From the point of view of learning design, the consequence of this is that bystanders merit to be considered as the potential learners of a pedagogical game as much as the players themselves

The data analyzed in this paper is classroom interaction in a class of 3rd graders working in pairs to solve a mathematical puzzle game. The research approach is practice-based design research, informed by ethnographic methods and multimodal interaction analysis. The aim of the interaction analysis is to inform further design through the creation of a collection of learning designs embodying principles of observational learning and social motivation, along with observations from their deployment in the classroom. Data is collected by using a wide-angle video-camera in the ceiling, which is recording nonstop, in combination with handheld video cameras recording over the shoulder of pairs engaged in the activity. Two pairs of learners are followed as they solve a complex logical puzzle. I will look at how the pair members construct each other as more or less “knowledgeable”, in relation to the process of the game and in relation to the task they have to solve. A second issue is to what extent the notion that the activity is a game contributes to structuring interaction between pair members in the two pairs followed. Since my approach concerns design of learning activities, both issues will be related to how opportunities for gameplay, collaboration and rivalry relate to the design of the learning activity.

Museums have always used different media to communicate, widen perspectives and bring new knowledge, but in the era of digital media, their various offerings are increasingly part of the media ecosystem. Our research interventions explored the possibility of reusing existing digitised material in a participatory setting. The aim was to explore the object-centred audience participatory method in digital settings. We held a series of digital and in-person workshops that invited the participants to “imagine” narratives about the provenance of the museum’s objects and journeys to Sweden in a playful and creative exploration. We could observe how the virtual workshop setting supported focused discussions, and allowed zooming, drawing and remixing of digital photographs to facilitate conversation. The workshop participants on-site worked with the museum objects on display to remediate them through photos, drawings, clay modelling, and writing down thoughts and questions about the objects on discussion postcards. The participants’ contributions were included in the virtual collection database (Carlotta), under the same collection as the other museum objects, making the remediation process circular. We argue that object-centred methods enable audience participation in digital media ecosystems both in museums and with other media makers. The audience’s expectations and experiences from using other media bring them to the digital museum platforms with a willingness to explore, remix and integrate.