Designing Looms as Kits for Collaborative Assembly

Both engineering kits and collaboration skills are increasingly prevalent in education and are often used in conjunction, yet little research addresses how kit hardware can be designed to support collaboration. Collaboration skills are best acquired through carefully designed collaborative experiences. While prior work highlights technology’s important role in fostering collaboration, less research explicitly explores hardware design. This paper posits that certain design features of kits can promote or hinder collaboration. We present a user study evaluating the collaborative assembly of two loom kits: one for higher education (RoboLoom) and one for individuals (Ashford Loom). We developed a coding scheme from the 3Cs framework (coordination, cooperation, and communication) to analyze which hardware features influenced collaboration. We find five design feature categories that may influence collaboration: repetitiveness, specificity, difficulty, parallelizability, and physicality. This paper presents our findings and recommendations for implementing these features into educational kit hardware design to create opportunities for collaboration.