On the Participatory Design of Jeliot Mobile: Towards a Socio-Constructivist Mlearning Tool

In this paper, the authors report the initial development stages of Jeliot Mobile, a tool that aims to bring the benefits of visualization to the new generation of learners that makes use of new technologies. From the research point of view the authors want to (1) frame the development of the tool in the socio-constructivist paradigm, and (2) bring the learner-centeredness via participatory design. The paper reports a series of workshops in which HCI students were asked to design a mobile tool for learning programming. The workshops followed the participatory design methodology. Each workshop set its very participants into a scenario different than other workshops by means of variation in introductory tools. The participants output -- in the form of design ideas described with tools like sketches, storyboards, and/or simple text -- at each workshop was then collected. These ideas were classified according to five categories: socio-constructivist, learning management, usability, software visualization, and miscellaneous. Usability and socio-constructivist accounted for the majority of the ideas. The number usability ideas can be partly explained because of the context (participants were HCI students). However, the abundance of socio-constructivist ideas points to the importance which students give to learning in a sociocultural context. Moreover, the sheer amount of ideas -- otherwise not envisioned by the designers -- explains the need to build mlearning tools in a participatory fashion. Thus, the results of experiments support authors´ stand of designing such tools in a learner-centered participatory fashion and framing the development in socio-constructivist paradigm.