Engaging children in remotely ideating and programming smart things

Recent research tried involving different end-users in the design of smart things, such as smart watches that sense high temperature, process it, and react by vibrating. Designing new smart things is a lengthy process, which requires exploring what smart things are made of, ideating them, as well as programming them. Engaging children across an entire design process is thereby demanding, e.g., it requires sustained attention and logical reasoning. Engaging children in design at a distance is even more complicated, e.g., there are no reference models. This paper reports on the design of an online workshop, which aimed at engaging children across the entire design process of smart things, of increasing complexity, and at a distance. Children were different for age and gender. An engagement questionnaire was administered to understand whether children were engaged in smart-thing design at a distance. This paper offers a descriptive statistical analysis of the results of the questionnaire, which are discussed to distil lessons for future engaging smart-thing design workshops at a distance.