Intentional Design for Empowerment

TL;DR

This paper advocates for empowering education through intentional design, using interactive simulations as a tool to foster student ownership of learning, based on a model leveraging educational affordances.

Contribution

It introduces a model that uses educational tool affordances to promote student empowerment and ownership in learning environments.

Findings

Interactive simulations support student ownership of learning.

Educational affordances can be intentionally designed to empower students.

The proposed model guides the design of empowering educational tools.

Abstract

I argue for empowering education, adapting Marx's idea of ownership of the means of production, and discuss interactive simulations as one example of a tool in which intentional design can support student ownership of learning. I propose a model that leverages affordances of educational tools to do positive work toward empowering education.