Understanding teenagers' personal contexts to design technology that supports learning about energy consumption

© 2013 Taylor & Francis. Energy sustainability is prevalent in political and popular rhetoric and yet energy consumption is rising. Teenagers are an important category of future energy consumers, but little is known of their conceptions about energy and energy saving. We report on empirical research with two groups of teenagers. This is part of ongoing work to design learning technologies that support teenagers learn about personal energy consumption. In this paper we describe our analysis and methodology, which are shaped by the Ecology of Resources (EoR) design framework [Luckin, R. (2010). Re-designing learning contexts: Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies. London and New York, NY: Routledge]. Our findings informed the development of an EoR model of the participants' personal context, which includes their world resources (people, tools, knowledge, skills, and environment) and their personal resources (conceptions, motivations and concerns around energy consumption). We discuss the range of methods we employed to understand learners' personal contexts. These findings contribute to our understanding of how to explore teenagers' personal contexts and have implications for the design of technology to support learning about personal energy consumption.