Students as Learning Designers in Innovation Education

This paper, which concerns criteria for developing technology-enhanced innovation education, discusses how teacher and student relationships change in these learning spaces. The case study in this paper involves a school in Denmark where teachers and students, aged 6-14, were involved in developing and testing new forms of technology-enhanced innovation education as part of the establishment of an EduTechLab at the school. Established in new facilities at the school, the lab contained learning technologies such as Nao robots, sensor kits, and 3D visualisation and printing facilities. The goal of the EduTechLab project was to establish a creative learning environment for students and teachers that would support innovative practice with new forms of learning technology. Part of this goal was to involve students in innovative design processes in order for them to experiment with their own design solutions to case problems. The project was organised as a series of workshops and teacher intervention in classes, where teachers were introduced to learning technologies and innovation process tools, and afterwards tested technologies and learning designs were tested in classes. Two researchers and two students followed the first six-month phase of the project, which involved 25 teachers (foreign languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry and Danish) and 40 children. Video observations were conducted of workshops and interventions in class, while qualitative interviews were conducted with teachers and students. Our results suggest that integrating learning technology into innovation education changes teacher roles and enhances the students’ role as co-designers of the learning environment and activities. We observed how the planned process and activities, initially defined and controlled by teachers, gradually changed during the process due to the collaboration that took place between the students and teachers. The student design process thus steadily changed from being teacher directed to open experimentation, where students co-defined processes, technologies and design goals. The impetus for these processes was partly the fact that the teachers changed their approach after experiencing how well the students handled complex design processes involving new technology. This paper discusses how these changed roles are an integrated part of working with knowledge production processes in schools in an ever-changing landscape of new technologies and how co-designer roles can be integrated in innovation education.