Facilitators First: Building a Tool With Facilitators to Foster a More Collaborative Makerspace Community Through Movement Traces

Abstract

Research indicates that makerspaces equip students with the practical skills needed to build their own projects and thrive in the twenty-first-century workforce. While the appeal of makerspaces lies in their spirit of tinkering and community-driven ethos, these same attributes make it difficult to monitor and facilitate learning. Makerspaces also attract students from diverse backgrounds and skills, further challenging facilitators to accommodate the needs of each student and their self-directed projects. We propose a dashboard interface that visualizes Kinect sensor data to aid facilitators in monitoring student collaboration. The tool was designed with an iterative and participatory approach. Five facilitators were involved at each phase of the design process, from need-finding to prototyping to implementation and evaluation. Insights derived from interviews were used to inform the design decisions of the final interface. The final evaluation suggests that the use of normalized summary scores and an interactive network graph can successfully support facilitators in tasks related to improving collaboration. Moreover, the use of a red-green color scheme and the inclusion of student photos improved the usability for facilitators, but issues of trustworthiness need to be further examined.