EAGER: Home-based DIY Interactive Information Physicalization for Young Children and their Parents

Public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced the central role data serves in shaping individual and community action. Data literacy is the ability to constructively reason with data. Fostering data literacy has largely been the domain of formal educational systems and expert tools. Informal educational approaches have the potential to overcome barriers to interacting with data by fostering data literacy through casual engagement. This research explores how informal learning, through creation and interaction with physical data representations (physicalizations), may foster increased data literacy and engagement. The project team will design a series of do-it-yourself (DIY) activities for young children to construct physicalizations from household materials. These activities will enable children to explore COVID-19 and other data in familial contexts. They are expected to help them reason about the pandemic and everyday information through embodied data sensemaking and creative processes of physical construction. This project serves the national interest by promoting universal data understanding to advance national data literacy, health, and welfare. It will directly support education and foster diversity by disseminating information physicalization kits to families across the nation. Resulting tools will be released as open source so that other researchers, designers, and developers can use them for diverse information physicalization projects.

The project will advance the field of information visualization with new physical and tangible representations and techniques. Through an iterative design methodology of participatory workshops and interviews, involving families, the project will: (1) develop a novel toolkit and instructions for families to build interactive information physicalizations, using common household materials and mobile computers; (2) connect the toolkit to COVID-19 and environmental citizen science data; (3) understand emergent phenomena involving how kids and families engage with information physicalizations, through grounded theory analysis of video and interview data; (4) assess effects of the information physicalizations on data literacy; and (5) develop implications for the design and crafting of tangible interfaces, using everyday materials, which facilitate sensemaking and learning in informal settings.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.