Towards Bridging the Gap between Participatory Design and Formal Education

The rapid advancement of digital technology is accompanied by increasing demands for digital literacy education for children and adolescents. Previous works often emphasize the need for promoting empowering learning experiences and creating opportunities for active participation in digitalization. Especially in child-computer interaction research, participatory design (PD) has been established as a means to meet these demands. However, to advance the integration of PD into formal education, it is necessary to align PD's creative, self-directed, and design-based learning settings with the often tight constraints of formal educational institutions. We consider the identification of suitable assessment and evaluation methods as an important contribution to further this alignment. Thus, this paper outlines preliminary findings from a review of works included in the 2018-2022 IDC conference proceedings, that address the evaluation of PD projects in formal educational settings. Only a small number of publications meet the inclusion criteria based on given constraints in this settings. Finally, we discuss preliminary insights regarding feasible evaluation methods and outline how the scarcity of matching works may point to an important research gap regarding the integration of PD with formal education.