About This Activity
BIO: Marcela Borge is an associate professor in Learning, design, and technology program at Penn State. Jessie Xie, Heliya Ahmadi, and Dahye Lee are Ph.D students in Learning, Design, and Technology program in College of Education. Their research focuses on improving children’s collaborative skills, design thinking, and technology literacy through playful, joyful, child- centered experiences. We use this club time to create a ThinkerSpaces for children to engage in diverse design thinking activities. They will use different materials and technologies to explore, collaborate, and design creatively. The goal of this club, as well as our research goal, is to help young learners understand their emotions, reframe experienced difficulties as opportunities to learn, take creative risks when designing, improve their collaborative skills, build a community with their peers, and enhance their collective design thinking process. Description: ThinkerSpaces Design Studios: Playful Futures is an innovative design club, where students can explore many popular emerging generative AI technologies through playful and meaningful learning experiences. In this club, children will engage with chat-based, visual, and audio AI tools to create games or community-based projects. Moreover, they can explore these technologies to learn how to use them to enhance their own thinking and creativity. Also, students will have opportunities to explore the potential that these technologies have for good and evil. Along the way, children will also learn how to work in design teams, how to cope with uncertainty, learn from design failures, make collective decisions, design their own inventions using multiple technologies, and have fun with new technologies. We will expect participants to think hard and play harder. Please note this club is structured with videos, design challenges, and expectations to work collaboratively with others. We will also record sessions so that we can understand how kids th
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