A Learner-Centered Design Method for Educational Technology.

Since 2003, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) has implemented projects that work directly with middle-school aged youth from underserved populations to develop digital resources aimed at encouraging young people to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers. It is through this work that EDC has developed an implemented a powerful, youth-centered, participatory research and design method for the design of educational technologies. This paper aims to share EDC's learnings from developing and implementing this method including addressing issues of trust between youth and adult team members, appropriately acknowledging youth contributions, balancing the roles of mentors and adult design partners, and making dynamic curriculum adjustments based on participants learning styles and skill levels. Since 2003, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) has implemented projects that work directly with middle-school aged youth from underserved populations to develop digital resources aimed at encouraging young people to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers. Through this work, EDC has developed and implemented a powerful, youth-centered, participatory research and design method for the design of educational technologies. This educational technology design method incorporates multiple elements and avenues for youth participation throughout the process of data collection. It consists of six phases, including elements based in research: conducting a literature review of existing topical research, gathering preliminary data on youth, gathering guiding data from youth, youth co-design team activities, product development, and evaluation. At the heart of this process, and the focus of this paper, are the youth co-design team activities. Each of the phases contributes a youth-centered point of view to the data collection process and, in turn, enables the products created in each project to be as youth-centered, youth-focused, and youth- informed as possible. Our underpinning assumption in this work is that youth involvement is essential to the process of designing products and activities specifically for middle school youth. To this end our educational technology design method incorporates multiple elements and avenues for youth participation throughout the process. Our resulting educational technology design method is thus an innovative approach to designing educational technologies with middle school youth for middle school youth. This paper shares EDC's learnings from developing and implementing this participatory design approach in the development of educational technology. Three projects that yielded successful outcomes are presented as case studies to illustrate this method in action. These National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) projects include Girls Communicating Career Connections (GC3) and two projects that are part of the NSF's National STEM Digital Library initiative (NSDL), namely The FunWorks and Middle School Portal 2 (MSP2): Math/Science Virtual Learning Experiences for Youth.