Introducing a Socio-Technical Perspective on Digital Competence Education Through Co-design

Abstract

Digital competence and programming have been part of the Swedish school curricula since 2018. This paper demonstrates how co-design design activities can be conducted as a way to provide digital competence education from a socio-technical perspective. Such activities were conducted with novice designers in three sessions, each with two school classes, from a Swedish engineering upper secondary school program in 2019. The students gained hands-on experience with interaction design and co-design as they designed a mobile application using a Wizard-of-Oz prototyping system and evaluated the prototype with users. This trial is used to argue that time allocation for socio-technical perspectives on digital competence in the Swedish school curricula can be expanded to be able to provide students with a more holistic view of digitization beyond technical issues