Video Data Analysis for Tracing Emotional Aspects of Collaborative Design and Making Processes

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to introduce a systematic, three-level video analysis method for tracing the emotional aspects of a collaborative design and making process. Maker-centred learning can evoke strong emotions affecting students’ motivation because it involves them in externalising their ideas through conceptual, visual and material artefacts. For analysing longitudinal collaborative processes, we developed the visual Making-Process-Rug video analysis method, which enables tracing materially mediated verbal and embodied making processes. We provide examples of the method using data, where a team of seventh-grade students performing regular schoolwork were engaged in using traditional and digital fabrication technologies for inventing, designing, and making artefacts. Taking a case study perspective, we focus on a team of four students who worked on a smart product project. We analysed video recordings from the team’s 11 hours of design and making sessions on three levels: macro, intermediate and micro. The benefit of the three-level method is that it allows simultaneous analysis of social-discursive and materially embodied aspects of activities. It also enables analysing large samples of video data systematically, and focusing on both micro-level and macro-level perspectives of activity. The method for identifying emotions from video data has potential for educational research on various fields, however, the culture-specific expressions and interpretations of emotions require special attention when developing the method further.

Keywords: basic education, collaborative process, emotional expression, Making-Process-Rug, sociomateriality, video analysis method