What Can We Learn About Remote Collaboration from Kids?

Not many folks know that Renés Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was pen pals with a princess, Elisabeth of Bohemia. Fewer people know that in those letters she would take him to task for arguments in his philosophy that didn’t work, making him fix them and explain himself.

Am I trying to say that someone should write a saucy historical romance about these two? No (Maybe). I am trying to say that today’s students are not the first people to ever have to collaborate on big ideas from afar. We know it can be done.

The question is, when can it be done? Meaning: What kind of work can get done remotely? What conditions support it? Most importantly, how can we make it easier for students?

Lucky for us, we don’t have to just study the transcripts of old French philosophers to learn how people collaborate remotely. Here at Northwestern University, the FUSE program has been interviewing kids who have been working remotely.FUSE is a STEAM education program with a suite of challenges, some of which are digital, some of which are hands on, some of which are both. In classrooms, collaboration on these challenges happens naturally. So, we think interviewing kids about if and how they’ve been using the challenges since remote learning began is a great way to learn about remote collaboration.

This is the first of a series of articles where we will look an interview with a student and think about what it can teach us about remote collaboration! Hopefully, as we look at more and more interviews, our understanding will grow, as will our tool set to help our students!

Now, these are research interviews, so we can’t use anyone’s real names. And they’re taken from transcripts, so I’ve edited the text for flow and clarity, but with those caveats out of the way, I present …

Interview Number One

What can we learn

Our first interviewee (and since we can’t use his real name, I’m going to call him “The Falcon,” because it’s cool, and I think I’m allowed to) is pretty typical of the students we interviewed. Sometimes “The Falcon” collaborates with his peers, sometimes he doesn’t. Let’s take a look at how he describes the times he does.

First, he collaborates on things like math. That hasn’t changed much from when he and his peers were in school, he says. He used to collaborate while doing FUSE’s hands-on challenges, but hasn’t since remote instruction began. What’s the difference between the two? I submit to you that “The Falcon” finds it easier to collaborate on math because math is often an abstract study. Zoom, phones, email, almost all of our methods of communication lend themselves to communicating language and pictures. Abstract representation.

So, math feels like a natural fit for collaboration over those technologies, the same way the abstract study of philosophy was a natural fit for letters in Descartes’ time. These technologies are not as well suited to another kind of human communication, which is manipulating the environment around us. As much as we’d like it to, a lot of our technology can’t effectively capture how we explain ourselves by doing.

For example, imagine a pair of kids working on FUSE’s “Coaster Boss” challenge, where kids attempt to make a steel ball rocket down a flexible half-pipe fast enough to go through a loop, but not so fast that it flies off the track. It takes some serious doing. If the pair of kids were working on it over a video call and only kid A had the kit, in order to make a precise suggestion, kid B would have to say something like “try kinking the track at a 63-degree angle at the 23-inch mark, and resolving the kink to a 45-degree slope 16 inches later.”

That’s a lot of words for something that, if they were in person, and kid B could get her hands on the track, could be accomplished with a simple “What about this?”A huge part of collaboration is iteration; giving and receiving input on your attempts to reach a goal. It’s a lot easier to give feedback by saying “What about this” over and over than it is to say some variation on “try kinking the track at a 63-degree angle at the 23-inch mark, and resolving the kink to a 45-degree slope 16 inches later,” over and over.

Like I said, most digital media doesn’t lend itself to this kind of communication. But there is one kind that does that “The Falcon” mentions; Multiplayer videogames. Videogames put a lot of thought into how multiple people can manipulate the same simulated environment, whether that be to build a tower in Minecraft, or find a traitor in Among Us (or whatever is cool now).

What to do about it

Am I going to suggest that you just let your students play videogames?

No. Not unless they’re willing to bribe me. However, I am going to suggest that when you assign students projects that aren’t abstract (like math or philosophy) with the hopes that they will collaborate remotely, you may have to consider their ability to manipulate physical items or digital representations of physical items in a way that allows students to clearly show what is in their heads without a lot of extra words.

If you’re asking students to work on something physical, consider assigning projects that have materials which are available plentifully and affordably (In FUSE we design projects that use things like old cardboard or dry pasta to accomplish this).

If kids are able to replicate each other’s work, they can show each other what they’re thinking through Zoom. If you’re asking students to work on something digitally, consider how quickly control of the project can be switched from one student to another. For instance, in FUSE, we ask students to use a program called TinkerCAD to make 3D models. A student could download their file and send it to a friend to manipulate. That’s fine, but perhaps it would be faster for them to do something weird, like log in with the same account while screensharing, so that all a student might have to do to take control would be to hit refresh.

If you found this interview analysis interesting then keep your eyes peeled for more like it in coming weeks! At the very least, come on back to see if I’m actually allowed to give kids code names like “The Falcon".