Abstract
This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time.
Highlights
This paper presents a set of interaction design principles to guide the development of citizen science tools that have an explicit focus on citizens’ or volunteers’ learning
Aligning with the pragmatic character of design-based research (Wang and Hannafin 2005), we initiated the research by asking University Technical College (UTC) staff to identify and suggest areas where the design of a citizen inquiry tool would complement their teaching and make a contribution to science learning and understanding, in particular students’ participation in inquiry learning
The design-based research (DBR) methodology adopted in this 4-year study led to the production of a set of requirements for designing citizen inquiry projects which are applicable to interaction design work and of relevance to researchers aiming to explicitly scaffold inquiry learning in citizen science projects
Summary
This paper presents a set of interaction design principles to guide the development of citizen science tools that have an explicit focus on citizens’ or volunteers’ learning. Herodotou et al Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (2018) 13:4 science tools. The focus of that work was on science investigations of relevance to young people, guided by a teacher, and starting in formal education settings, that of the classroom. This line of research was further developed to understand how such guided discovery approach could be extended to the wider public, by exploring how citizen science might be a basis for personally meaningful inquiry learning
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