’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Tomorrow ’ s World nQuire : young people ’ s requirements for engaging with inquiry-led , civic engagement technologies Conference or Workshop Item

Citizen inquiry describes the learning benefits to people who engage actively in inquiry-led investigations. The Tomorrow’s world nQuire project, a collaboration between The Open University and the BBC in the UK, utilises the citizen inquiry paradigm to design an online platform to support large-scale public experiments, linked to TV or radio programmes. Scaffolding the investigations has been a challenging task, exploiting technology affordances that integrate guidance for inquiry-led activities and mass collaborative participation. The aim of this study is to examine the usability of an early version of the platform and understand, in particular, how young people aged 16 to 18 in particular perceive technologies that support inquiry-led social science investigations. Outcomes revealed that there is a preference by the majority of the young participants to use mobile devices for accessing the platform. This finding emphasises the importance of mobilised learning and mobile-friendly design for engaging teenagers with inquiry-led activities. Author keywords Citizen inquiry, inquiry-led technology, mobilised learning, civic engagement INTRODUCTION Citizen inquiry forms a new approach to inquiry science learning, that exploits online social networks, mobile technologies and the knowledge of professional scientists to support public participation in inquiry-based activities (Herodotou, Sharples & Scanlon, 2017). The central idea of citizen inquiry is the engagement of the public in all the stages of an inquiry, enabling them to gain insight into the practices and challenges of inquiry, while researching something personally meaningful and contributing their knowledge. The Open University, UK, has developed the nQuire-it platform (http://www.nquire-it.org/) to explore citizen inquiry. The development of nQuire-it platform originated from the idea of having citizens act as scientists by enabling them to initiate, manage, share and complete inquiries related to their own interests (Herodotou, VillasclarasFernandez & Sharples, 2014). nQuire-it offers three types of inquiry (called missions), each of which uses a different method of data collection. Sense-it missions are connected to the Sense-it Android application (https://goo.gl/K41vU6) and collect sensor measurements. Spot-it missions make use of pictures that are uploaded to nQuire-it. Win-it missions have a research question that requires text as an answer. Each mission incorporates inquiry steps that the mission creator sets up to guide their co-investigators. Evidence from exploring the engagement of the nQuire-it users suggests that citizens might become more engaged when they are involved in personally meaningful inquiries (Aristeidou, Scanlon & Sharples, 2017). The Tomorrow’s world nQuire project is a collaboration between the BBC and The Open University (2017-2018), that aims to redevelop nQuire-it (now named nQuire) and host large-scale public experiments in social sciences such as psychology, linked to TV or radio programmes. This work will further develop and extend the existing functionality of the nQuire-it platform, integrating a new type of inquiry that supports surveys and quizzes for social science inquiries, and upgrading the functionality for hosting mass-participation experiments. This will allow citizens to create and contribute to online inquiries that explore aspects of social science. Scaffolding the creation of social science inquiries involves step-bystep guidance with a number of options for entering your questions, and aggregating the results. Contributing to the inquiries is reinforced by new ways to enter responses, secure handling of personal data, and receiving immediate feedback of the overview results. The research objectives of this study are to examine the usability of one of the early versions of the new platform with young people aged 16 to 18, and understand whether this age group has specific design requirements for engaging with inquiry-led technologies. The version of the platform under examination has also been tested with adults and significantly enhanced and changed. Software applications (Newman et al., 2012) and Web 2.0 technologies (Catlin-Groves, 2012), such as citizen inquiry online platforms, might comprise the means to raise young people’s interest in inquiry learning and encourage youth civic participation. This study is significant not only for the evaluation and improvement of the platform,