Work with Children as Designers, advocates Ultralab's Heppell

Looking back over the contribution of Ultralab to educational technology, Stephen Heppell of Anglia Polytechnic University had some advice to offer in the pursuit of student-centred design.

'The global fatal error is to look to computers for productivity - doing old things faster - rather than creativity - doing new things,' he told the audience at the "Dust or Magic" conference in Oxford last month.

Children in schools are understretched: there is a tendency to teach so that students always know what the end-point will be when they start anything. This is not conducive to stretching them, he said, showing footage of children adequately watching four televisions at once and following their content. He then went on to demonstrate ways of developing the 'agile, collaborative, ingenious people' that companies are looking to employ.

He advocated using digial resources for encouraging participation, not point-and-click interaction. Tools are for 'annotation, contribution and provocation', he said.

And when you involve children as designers you have an opportunity to teach and learn at the same time. He showed off examples of the eTui collaboration with students: toys which help to reflect on one's own learning. And he illustrated the insights to be gained by involving learners: '"With most of our software we get our fun getting things wrong" they told us.' Now Ultralab tools are designed so that if something is entered wrong, the user just carries on till they get it right - there is no interesting feedback to play with, to reward mistakes and confuse the learning.

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