Co-designing Edutainment Applications with Kindergarten Teachers in an Online Setting

The technological progress from the last decades has created the context for new changes in education. Integrating technology in the learning process for school age children is one of the challenges of this decade. Unfortunately, there is no focus on preschoolers that are born digital natives. In this paper, we address the problem of designing edutainment applications for preschoolers with the participation of educational experts, the kindergarten teachers. We describe how we have adapted the activities from the Participatory Design approach in the context of COVID19 pandemic, where social distancing was required, and we had to move all the design activities in an online setting. The results of our investigation show that participatory design is possible even in an online setting, but some limitations are determined by the lack of in-person interaction. At the same time, an advantage due to the flexibility and shared access to resources is underlined.