Student Maker Portfolios: Promoting Computational Communication and Reflection in Crafting E-Textiles

Maker activities have a strong focus on creating artifacts as a rich context for learning but offer few opportunities for student makers to articulate and reflect on their acts of learning and making. Yet beyond artifact creation, acts of communication enable novice makers to reflect on their learning and share their ideas and resources with larger creative communities. In this paper we report on our iterative design of a portfolio assessment intended to support computational communication alongside students' electronic textile productions. The portfolio was implemented as part of an electronic textiles curricular unit in ten computer science classrooms (N=237 students). We discuss our initial impetus for designing the portfolio as well as the revisions made along the way based on analysis of students' differing motivations and capacities for communicating about their projects, both textually and visually. We report on which design features best supported students' maker reflections and computational communication, and provide recommendations for future design of maker portfolios and further avenues of research.