Playing by the rules: co-designing interactive installations with pupils

During the last couple of decades our perception of what constitutes a good learning environment has changed. Thanks to the use of technology, education is evolving from a passive model towards a more productive model, where students generate knowledge, teach each other, and collaborate on activities that make learning fun and interesting. In some previous works we have adopted this attitude: creating interactive installations thought for learning in an amusing way. Design-based research has demonstrated its potential as a methodology suitable to both research and design of technology-enhanced learning environments, a further step consists in co-design: students directly involved in designing with researchers. This paper provides some comments on the evaluation of the learning experience using two interactive installations promoting eco-friendly behaviours, and describe our experience in codesigning with pupils. We also report the ethnographic research performed underlining the weaknesses and the strengths, the difficulties and findings during the whole work.