Empowering Girls to Be Our Colleagues: Learning Experience Design Case of Summer Camp Engaging Design Thinking for Extended Reality

Abstract

While improving STEM education and participation has been an objective for decades, a shortage of STEM professionals and gaps in career attainment for women and people of color persist. Educators have increasingly experimented with immersive technologies to engage students in STEM, but many interventions have failed to teach transferable skills or capture usability and student experience in ways that inform future work. This paper presents the design and delivery of a summer camp for middle and high school girls, aimed at teaching design thinking and user experience (UX) testing using immersive technology. Our learner-centered approach introduced students to HCI principles such as usability and design thinking, scaffolding activities from brainstorming to testing XR tools and games, and culminating in students presenting early prototypes they designed. The camp was grounded in the LEDSEL (Learning Experience Design for Scaffolded Experiential Learning) framework, which guides experience design through scaffolded, experiential learning that considers environmental and sociocultural contexts. All students voluntarily presented their prototypes publicly, adopted professional UX language such as “ease of use” and “comfort,” addressed usability issues, and engaged STEM speakers, while their interest in returning and pursuing STEM roles suggests benefits of this approach. Key design principles emerging from the camp include using XR as a participatory medium for critique and creation, embedding UX evaluation early, scaffolding from immersive experience to reflection and prototyping, leveraging peer mentoring, providing authentic audiences, and layering instructional support to scaffold STEM learning in informal, learner-centered contexts.