Team

Alissa N. Antle (PI, research and design lead)
Dr. Yumiko Murai (Assistant Prof. Educ. Tech., SFU)

Graduate students:
Alexandra Kitson (post-doc)
John Desnoyers-Stewart
Yves Candau
Katrien Jacobs
Ofir Sadka
Zoe Dao- Kroeker (NSERC USRA, VPR USRA)

Learn more here

Project Summary

The Critical Making Biowearable Workshop project investigates how to design and deploy a participatory computational thinking workshop in which students explore and reflect on potential impacts of biowearables during biowearable making activities using a pre-made tangible-biowearable kit and reflection cards. Due to Covid-19 the co-located workshop designed for the SFU Maker Space with young adults was transformed to a virtual workshop with 12-14 year olds working with community partner Brilliant Labs in Atlantic Canada.

Research Objectives

Design, develop, deploy and evaluate a critical making “materials kit” and workshop for young adults/teens to enable them to critically reflect on ethical issues related to (bio)wearables as they learn technological skills related to wearable technologies. During the workshop youth assemble and customize a tangible-wearable system that uses a biowearable (on-body breath sensor) to control a hybrid physical-digital pinwheel seated in a lightbox base (image on right). The software component of the kit utilizes under-determined code points, scaffolded with reflection cards (see Critical Reflection Card Set: Biowearables), to teach youth about critical and ethical issues that arise and can be addressed during the making process.

Social Impact Goals

Develop a biowearable kit for co-located workshops with and a kit for remotely distribution and assembly in virtual workshops for youth as part of critical reflection on ethics in computation thinking education.

Keywords

Design ethics, critical making, wearables, on-body technologies, virtual workshop, youth.

Technology

BITalino piezoelectric respiration sensor, Adafruit Huzzah microprocessor board, plastic pulleys, laser cut birch plywood, origami paper, elastic band, Adafruit Motor Featherwing, DC motor, 8 bit RGB LED matrix, misc. electronic components and breadboards, custom stretch respiration sensor, open source B.Board microprocessor & prototyping platform, PDF assembly guide and videos.

Community Partners

Jeff Wilson (Executive Director), Alisha Collins, Josh Keyes, Amanda Sherman (Brilliant Labs, Atlantic Canada)

Funders

SFU Innovates, NSERC Discovery