FUSE and Co-Designing Tools for Discovery with Primary School Children and Teachers was co-authored by Leon Cruickshank, Diane Potts, Lee Brewster, Violet Owen and Nik Marsdin and published in the books Design for Education Spaces and Tools for Learning.
In this chapter we explore how educational tools and resources developed collaboratively in COVID-19 were used in schools across Lancaster and Morecombe in the northwest of England. We wanted to help primary school children retain their sense of inquisitiveness and exploration when confined to the house for 23 hours a day. We share 2000 boxes with families served by schools that support children with limited resources at home EG families without Internet access limited social supports precarious incomes. Like educators everywhere we were concerned about the correlation between low income and educational attainment would be exacerbated by lockdown but also conceived that the underlying issues would not be addressed by a superficial technocentric approach. In a response to a call for help from a number of local primary schools rather than giving families digital devices as other projects did our approach was to develop tools and resources that help children not to go quiet and can largely uncommunicative often in front of a television. Working from our collaborations during the extraordinary context created by COVID-19 this chapter goes on to describe how we built on this initial product develop new approaches to Co design with primary school children teachers and teaching assistants.
