A Lightweight Co-Construction Activity for Teaching 21st Century Skills at Primary Schools

Abstract

Employing learning processes that promote 21st Century skills is now a requirement in Finnish schools and elsewhere. Participatory design/co-design activities have shown to foster design thinking and computational thinking skills in primary school level participants, but a lightweight applicable model of such an activity is yet to be presented. We develop a lightweight hybrid co-construction method based on software development via two exploratory case studies in a Finnish primary school. For the purpose of evaluating objectively the motivating effects of our activity, we elaborate upon four concerning dimensions that arise from previous studies. In our resulting activity, an adult programmer is partnered with a group of children to, in this case, construct math games together. The children felt empowered and motivated by working with us in this way, however, further study is required on the effects this kind of an activity has in comparison to alternative teaching methods.