Our design course was guided largely by the perspective that has driven Ron Eglash’s Culturally Situated Design Tools: the idea, in a nutshell, that ethnic minorities in schools are often alienated by the cultural dimensions of traditional curricula and pedogogy, and that educators could reduce “cultural barriers” and foster students’ interest in academics through activities that are more relevant with regard to students’ personal, social, and cultural backgrounds.

For me, if educational technology was to be seen as a solution, this perspective was necessarily connected to a deeper problem in the pedagogy of modern schools. The problem, something I will discuss again and again in this journal, is in the way learning is typically understood: it is treated as a top-down process. In all but the most superficial ways—except in a few schools which have succeeded in reversing this processes—the content and methods of learning are decided by educators and imposed on students. Students are not allowed to make any meaningful decisions about the way their education will take place; they are not trusted with true responsibility for their own education. This is the defining force in the structure and philosophy of a classroom. If schools contain cultural barriers, then this philosophy is a factor. Thus reducing cultural barriers in schools also requires us to examinine the politics of education.

In my view, it is not enough to design technology that affords culturally relevant pedagogy within the existing framework. We must also look for ways to enable students to study content that is personally relevant and to study it in a way that is personally relevant. The Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs), for example, could be understood as personally relevant vehicles for a predetermined educational agenda, that is, the existing curricula which they were designed to teach. Most of the CSDTs are excellent, successful pieces of a solution to the problem discussed earlier—they are good, but incomplete. The next step, however, is to address the underlying educational agenda and design vehicles for curricula which are themselves culturally situated and personally relevant.

Throughout the design process for the semester, I was increasingly motivated by the need for this next step. I was troubled by the assumption that anyone, a designer or an educator, should take precedence over an individual student in deciding what that student needs to learn. Instead, a student’s learning process should be guided primarily by his or her own feeling about what is relevant and appropriate; otherwise, the student has no reason to learn at all. So, if technology has (or, if I as a designer have) any role in improving education at a deep level, that principle is key. Thus my design goals are to support and motivate students in discovering what is relevant in the world, exploring the ideas that are interesting and important, and building their own experiences in learning. My only educational agenda is to make sure that learning occurs on students’ own terms.

While these ideas are much broader than the scope of educational technology, we wanted to stay true to this philosophy in our design project. My team (Anasha Cummings, Joe DiLuzio, and myself) attempted to design a product that would meet some of the goals I have discussed, among others.

The design, DrumKit Arduino, is a set of robotic mallets that students can program from a computer in order to build rhythms and play music. In the spirit of LilyPad Arduino, the system extends the standard Arduino platform, meaning that it can be programmed in the same ways in which any other Arduino could be programmed, and it could also be extended by users and integrated with other electronics and/or software.

Although it is a concept design with a one-off prototype, our intention was to create a multi-dimensional system that would encourage students to explore and experiment. A user could focus on the musical aspects of the system (which is capable of producing many different rhythms and sounds), on programming the system (by writing programs of increasing complexity), on the mathematical aspects of the system (interacting with the mathematics of rhythm via the mathematics of program-writing), or on all three. The system is not structured to teach certain technical concepts but instead designed to excite students in a way that will make those concepts interesting.

Our DrumKit mini-site contains full explanations, photos, videos, and documentation of our research and development process.