Constructionist Microworld for Engineering Education: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis of ARPAID’s Usability, User Experience, and Learning Impact in Mechanical Assembly Learning
Description
Teaching engineering drawing and understanding mechanical assemblies involve challenges related to spatial visualisation and part interaction. ARPAID, a 3D mi-croworld grounded in Seymour Papert’s constructionism, was developed to address these issues. This study explores students’ perceptions of ARPAID, focusing on its strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement in interface and pedagogical functional-ities, and its effectiveness as a constructionist learning environment. A qualitative Codebook Thematic Analysis was conducted on semi-structured video interviews with 21 first-year engineering students at a Spanish university during the 2020–21 academic year. Participants represented Aerospace, Electronic and Electrical Engineering programmes. Data were systematically coded, reviewed and refined. Seven themes emerged: perceptual and graphical experience, interface design, usabil-ity and interaction, educational value, improvements, theoretical implications, and emotional and attitudinal value. Recurring patterns in participants’ accounts revealed clear strengths and weaknesses, alongside specific design and instructional aspects requiring refinement. Students’ reflections also showed strong alignment with core constructionist principles, including learning by making and objects to think with. Overall, ARPAID is perceived as a valuable educational tool for learning mechanical assemblies. The findings support its validity as a constructionist microworld and pro-vide actionable directions for improving usability, interface design, and pedagogical effectiveness in future developments.
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Steps to reproduce
The data were generated through a qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews and analysed using a Codebook Thematic Analysis (CTA) approach. Participants were first-year engineering students who had previously used the ARPAID application as part of their coursework. A purposive sampling strategy was applied, selecting students who had completed a prior Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire, thereby ensuring familiarity with the system under evaluation. Data collection was conducted through 21 semi-structured video-recorded interviews, carried out either in person or via videoconference. An interview guide comprising 45 items was used to ensure consistency across sessions, covering user interface, usability, and educational value. The semi-structured format allowed participants to provide spontaneous, in-depth accounts of their experience while ensuring that all relevant topics were addressed. During remote sessions, screen recording of the mobile device running ARPAID was enabled, allowing participants to demonstrate interactions in real time, which enriched the contextual interpretation of the data. All interviews were transcribed verbatim prior to analysis. The analysis followed a Codebook Thematic Analysis workflow, combining deductive and inductive coding. An initial codebook was developed based on established frameworks in usability, user experience (UX), and graphical interface design. This codebook was iteratively refined throughout the analysis to incorporate emergent themes identified in participants’ accounts. Coding was conducted using MaxQDA Analytics Pro 24, which facilitated systematic organisation, segmentation, and retrieval of qualitative data. To ensure consistency and analytical rigour, a subset of interviews (approximately 23%) was jointly coded by multiple researchers to establish coding agreement and refine the coding scheme. The remaining interviews were subsequently coded following the agreed criteria. Themes and subthemes were identified through iterative cycles of coding, categorisation, and conceptual abstraction, following established CTA procedures. The final thematic structure was derived from patterns of semantic recurrence and conceptual coherence across the dataset. This workflow—including the use of a structured interview protocol, systematic coding procedures, and specialised qualitative analysis software—ensures transparency and provides a reproducible framework for similar studies examining user experience and learning processes in educational technologies.
Institutions
- Universidad de LeonCastilla y León, Leon