By author > Waibel Clemens

Open learning environments such as makerspaces and inquiry-based learning promise rich opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and self-regulated learning, with particular benefits for inclusion and engagement in STEM (Bosse et al., 2024). Yet these formats also shift teachers' roles from content deliverers to facilitators and orchestrators of diverse, concurrent student projects often under constraints of time, class size and technical reliability (Kajamaa et al., 2020). Within the DEEP consortium, the Scafalle project investigates how digital scaffolds can foster the sustainable implementation of such open formats in everyday educational practice.  

This contribution reports on the design and evaluation of three co-design workshops (N = 15 teachers) that aimed to elicit concrete needs in makerspace and inquiry-based learning. It further describes on how participants  co-ideated scaffolds and derived design principles for a supportive application. Each workshop combined focus-group discussions, collaborative sketching of tool concepts, and evaluation of early digital-interface prototypes. All sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed. The qualitative content analysis is primarily based on the first workshop, while materials from later sessions were used to refine codes and design requirements. 

Building on these analyses, the resulting insights were translated into concrete design implications for a digital tool: (a) student-facing scaffolds to foster independence; (b) structured project templates that keep inquiry open; (c) a teacher administrative view for quick oversight of progress and support needs across groups and students. Collectively, these features target both sides of the classroom ecology: reducing teachers' immediate load while strengthening students' autonomy. The workshops also produced a first low-fidelity prototype embodying these principles. We will present the co-design process and requirements, as well as exemplar screens, and outline the next steps towards translating these into a digital application.