El-Ashry, Amina H.Zhang, XinranShrotri, SavaniAbler, SusannaHamidi, Foad2021-11-182021-11-182021-10-23El-Ashry, Amina H. et al.; Exploring the Collaboration Possibilities of Distributed Making for Storytelling Using 3D Printing Pens; CSCW '21: Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Pages 44–48, 23 October, 2021; https://doi.org/10.1145/3462204.3481755https://doi.org/10.1145/3462204.3481755http://hdl.handle.net/11603/23382CSCW '21: Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, , October 23–27, 2021, Virtual Event, USAAs digital making tools, such as 3D printers and laser cutters, become more affordable and easier to use by non-experts, new opportunities arise for geographically distributed designers to use them collaboratively and at a distance. In this exploratory study, we investigated the possibilities of a 3D printing pen for collaboratively creating multimodal stories around the themes of ecology and climate change for elementary school-aged children. Our interdisciplinary team of four students met regularly over a video link and used shared documents and 3D pens to create a multimodal adventure book, with audio and tactile elements, that we then used as a design probe to elicit feedback from experienced community science educators working with children about the possibilities of using hands-on distributed collaborative techniques in the future. We found that using this approach is promising for facilitating creative verbal and visual collaboration at a distance, and using tactile and audio representations with narrative elements provides new ways to reflect on complex topics, such as climate change.5 pagesen-USThis item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.3D printersmultimodal storiesmultimodal adventure bookdistributed collaborative techniquesText