Information-building applications: designing for data exploration and analysis by elementary school students

The propagation of Inquiry Based Learning has lead to many more elementary students interacting with authentic scientific tools and practices. However, the more problematic realities of scientific data collection, such as noise and large data sets, are often deliberately hidden from students. Students will need to confront these realities and be able to make skillful data scoping decisions in order to make sense of ever more prevalent large datasets. We dub software designed to support these activities Information-Building Applications (IBAs). This paper presents the design considerations that went into building an exemplar IBA, PhotoMAT (Photo Management and Analysis Tool), a brief user study to show how the solutions enacted by following these principles are taken up by actual students, and a discussion of how the design considerations identified by our work might be applied to another IBA.