Computational empowerment: participatory design in education

ABSTRACT

We propose computational empowerment as an approach and a Participatory Design (PD) response to challenges related to the emerging need for digital literacy in lower secondary education. Our approach extends the current focus on computational thinking to include a concern for how children and youth are empowered through constructive, analytical and critical engagement with technology. We argue that PD has the potential to drive a computational empowerment agenda in education by connecting political PD with contemporary visions for addressing a future digitised labour market and society. We provide a model for understanding and engaging with computational empowerment and report on the emergence of the computational empowerment agenda in a Danish context and how this agenda is reflected in the newly developed curriculum for a course on technology comprehension running on trial basis in 46 schools across Denmark.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational empowerment
• participatory design
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Danish: ‘Teknologisk handleevne’. ‘Handleevne’ could arguably be translated more precisely as ‘ability to act’ or ‘capacity to act’. Here we use ‘Technological ability’ for brevity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by VILLUM FONDEN [grant no. 28831].