Tiffany Tseng, Mitchel Resnick

Abstract

While sharing design projects is often seen as an essential component of participating in the maker community, ways in which young people can meaningfully participate have only begun to be supported. In this paper, we contribute an evaluation of Spin, a system for youth to capture and share animations of physical design projects. We describe how educators and students used Spin in 16 different K-12 makerspaces over 6 months, ranging from 2-hour-long workshops to extended 8-week engagements. Through our analysis of over 450 animations created during this timeframe and interviews and surveys with users, we outline the role of engagement, integration, and modularity for making documentation practice relevant and meaningful. We distill these ideas into design principles for creating documentation tools to support young makers.