Browsing by Author "Yrjönsuuri, Varpu"

The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse elementary school students' material practices and materially mediated designing during a collaborative design process. Materiality in design was examined from three points of view: (1) materials as an aid for thinking, (2) materials as social mediators and (3) physical properties of materials. Previous studies concerning materiality have been focusing mostly in adults' design process. The data was collected as part of the research project Co4-Lab, in which elementary school students engage in a collaborative designing. Research data consisted of the video recordings of six design sessions where three groups of 5th grade students were building a material model of their innovation. Three levels of analysis were conducted, including an overview of the design session, identifying significant events and detailed analysis of dialogue and embodied actions. Deeper analysis become possible by combining all three levels. The results indicate that students used materials as mediators for ideation and collaboration. Materials became visible as an aid for thinking when students were testing ideas or structures. They also manipulated materials during a collaborative ideation. In social interaction materials were used to support verbalization and they affected division of work. There were also some problems related to materials. Constructing the simple models was slow, a lot of non-task related actions occurred and some students were left without anything to do. The role of the model as an aid for designing seemed to be vague. Modelling was used mostly to solve issues concerning the model itself not the object of design. Guidance and support is important to utilize full potential of materiality in elementary school students' design process.