Opportunities and Scaffolds for Critical Reflection on Ethical Issues in an Online After School Biowearable Workshop for Youth

The rapid adoption of biowearables, such as smartwatches, raises ethical issues as youth are increasingly being tracked, monitored and given feedback on a growing number of measures. To address this pressing need, we investigated how to support youth to understand and explore these ethical issues grounded in the processes of prototyping during an afterschool online critical making workshop. The main contribution of this paper is our critical reflection framework, consisting of three interrelated components: ethical issues, technical opportunities, and reflection scaffolds. We focus on ethical issues related to the potential for biowearables to negatively impact six constructs taken from child development. We describe how we created a biowearable-tangible prototyping kit that has under-determined design decision points, creating technologically-mediated opportunities for reflection during the iterative prototyping process. Third, we present a set of critical reflection cards created to support youth to explore the ethical issues related to those decision points. We provide two scenarios from a pilot study that illustrate our framework in action, providing preliminary validation for our approach in an online environment.