Norms and collaboration in hybrid making-spaces

Productive collaborative learning and the utilization of educational robots as a tool for developing conceptual understanding and promoting student engagement and interest levels are considered crucial components of our teaching and learning environments. This is becoming more prevalent with the rise of making spaces where collaboration is a key principle and expectation for learning from one another. In this paper, we utilized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to illustrate how norms and expectations around the educator’s role and student’s ways of acting and behaving in a hybrid making space disrupted the collaborative experience for a group of fifth-grade students engaged with an educational robotics task. In particular, the collaborative experience became fractured through three contradictions: through the introduction of time, an unclear relationship between students and teacher, and competition for a technological device or tool. Through the examples provided, we demonstrate ways that inattention to expectations and norms in making space design can create obstacles for teachers to foster collaboration and for students to leverage one another’s knowledge and skills. We conclude with implications for the design of a collaborative activity within a space that accounts for formal and informal norms and expectations, and recommendations for tools intended for use in a collaborative environment.