Value-driven learning: Decoding and building upon playful computing education (Invited keynote)

The use of playful interactions, clever metaphors, and wordplay are ways that we make computation more appealing to young people and more accessible and intuitive to everyone. But play is a culturally situated notion, and ways that we embed playfulness into our designs can carry unintended messages that encourage or discourage productive use. The focus of this talk is to introduce the term Value-driven Learning through unpacking our notions around play and metaphor, how those notions shape technology practices in various cultures, and to look at Participatory Design as a method for designing Value-driven Learning. In this presentation, I explore theories of play and metaphor. Using these theories, I look at critiques of technology that illustrate how play and metaphor are situated within different cultures and impact technology practices. As an approach to address these critiques, I introduce the term Value-driven Learning, and create a conceptual framework for how we can build upon play and interest of learners into sustained engagement with learning. Specifically, I explore Participatory Design, an often playful practice that helps designers learn from participants, breaking down power imbalances and cultural differences, creating shared vocabulary, and scaffolding the design process so participants can better contribute to co-designing. I explore Participatory Design as both a formative methodology and a guiding principle for Meta-design of technology, which allows the participants ongoing agency in reshaping and reinterpreting technology.