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Intergenerational Design Team

The Sociable Literacy Project aims to create an engaging environment for reading, sharing, collaborating, and community-building for middle- and high-school-age youngsters. Central to our values as developers is the idea that the people who are to use the tools we create need to help shape those tools. When the people who will be the primary users are tweens and teens, the design team must include them and must provide a genuinely collegial and respectful atmosphere so that all participants will know that everyone's ideas are valuable and valued.

Engaging even very young children as design partners was pioneered by Dr. Allison Druin, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and her colleagues helped train the research team at the University of Baltimore and provided extensive support as we built our first team and began to explore new interfaces and suggest new interactions for the International Children's Digital Library.