International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction最新文献

Participatory Design (PD) with children allows children to contribute to, or have control over, the development of technologies for themselves and others like them. However, the children who are most likely to be involved in PD are often the most privileged. This special issue seeks to push the boundaries of PD with children. The papers published in this special issue examine designing with children from many countries; designing with minority groups; digital distributed PD; the right length for PD projects; and new approaches to PD.

Given the renewed interest in understanding the role of parent involvement in youth education, out-of-school (OST) learning offers alternatives to allow families multiple ways to engage in their children’s learning, as well as to cultivate community with one another. Prior research suggests that parent engagement is especially important for Black and brown youth, who have been historically marginalized and who, at high rates, live in communities that have faced historical and current systemic inequity. We created Digital Youth Divas (DYD), an OST computing and STEAM educational program from a transformative justice perspective that seeks to serve as a broker of relationships and OST opportunities as well as a community for Black and Latina girls and their families to advocate for the opportunities they want to see and counter harms computing education has historically enacted. We ask the following research questions: How do parents and caring adults navigate systems and relationships in cultivating out-of-school STEAM and non-STEAM experiences for their children? What supports should program providers design to allow for parent and caring adult involvement in their children’s OST activities? Using a case study approach, we interviewed 10 families in our program to understand their experiences in the program, how they manage their youth’s OST activities and interests, and how they navigate the local OST ecosystem. Through an iterative qualitative analysis process, three trends emerged from the interview data: for parents and caring adults to engage with OST computing programs that aim to leverage a transformative justice approach, programs must design in ways that: (1) attend to historicity of parent relationships to both community and computing, (2) make space for multiple parenting styles and situations, and (3) are intentionally designed for parent ownership. While there is still much to be done to repair harms enacted by computing and STEAM educational programs and provide space for parents and educators together to seek justice for our youth, our findings provide implications regarding ways that future programs and interventions can effectively engage Black and Latine families.

We engaged with 21 teens to plan an intergenerational participatory design program called Teenovate for creating teen-centered online safety interventions. Socio-technical solutions for adolescent online safety mostly take on parent-centric approaches, overlooking teens’ developmental experiences and growing desires for social autonomy. Therefore, we focused on creating a program which prioritizes strategies and solutions that center teens as the authority of their own online safety. This program would utilize a restorative justice approach, working to combat the historic inequalities that teens have faced in trying to manage their own online safety. We found that teens were intrinsically motivated to participate in a design program that would provide potential career experience and opportunities to make an impact in the field of online safety. Teens also acknowledged the importance of including different perspectives beyond their own in the design process, where contextually appropriate. However, they were also skeptical of being able to meaningfully contribute to the design space, due their lack of technical expertise and fear that adults would ignore or misuse their ideas. Therefore, teens desired an inviting educational space that would guide them into becoming equal contributors by teaching them the needed skills in research and design. Thus, we propose a new design role for teens, research-apprenticeship, based in Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), as an approach for balancing the tensions between dependence and autonomy when co-designing. This new justice-centered approach would allow teens to have long-term impact on the outcomes and products of large-scale participatory research programs, as well as keep teens safe online through a new generation of online safety tools created for and by teens.

With the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and national commitments requiring effective implementation of evidence-based innovations, we are witnessing a growing number of related interventions in educational environments based on digitalization and gamification. In particular, serious games and playful activities are being used to empower children’s awareness and reflection on issues related to climate change and sustainability. In this work, we discuss such approaches through the lens of our own experience with an intervention targeting school environments. Our study is based on a playful web application that focuses on sustainability awareness and energy-related aspects, the GAIA Challenge, which was used in over 25 schools in 3 countries, resulting in 3762 registered users. We present a longitudinal study on the use of GAIA Challenge focusing on children’s engagement, rate of completion of the content on offer, and overall reaction by the school communities involved in large-scale trials, complemented with insights from surveys answered by 723 students and 32 educators. Our results showed that up to 20% of the children completed all content available in the Challenge, when gameplay sessions were combined with strong community competition activities. The children also reported increased awareness of related sustainability issues. Our findings demonstrate that a simple playful experience can yield good results within educational environments, by taking into consideration typical school constraints, integrating it to the daily activities of schools and placing it within their strategy.

Game Design and Virtual Reality (VR) researchers theorize that VR technologies have great potential to scaffold children’s empathy development. To explore the effectiveness of VR in promoting empathy for children ages 6–9, we developed a framework for a VR Empathy Game based on the results of a participatory design study including 11 children and the Early Childhood Development literature. To evaluate this framework, we developed a game based on it and conducted a qualitative study with 14 children. We explored how children understand the meaning of the game and their approach to playing the game. Using descriptive thematic analysis, we found: (1) VR identity of a player can be used as an indicator of engagement in the game, and (2) a connection between motivation, engagement in the game story, and the game performance. This paper contributes a novel VR Empathy Game framework and insight into its effectiveness in creating empathic experiences for children.

Computational thinking refers to a series of cognitive processes involved in solving problems through computational systems. A growing body of studies has managed to demonstrate the correlation between computational thinking and different cognitive domains. In recent decades, multiple studies have taken place that seek to evaluate the effect of computational thinking on higher-order cognitive processes. The current study aims to contribute to this discussion by analyzing the effect of an intervention program in computational thinking on the executive functions of school-age children. In this experimental study, 30 children aged 10 and 11 were randomly assigned to an experimental group and an active control group. The instruments to collect the data were 15 tests of the neuropsychological battery of executive functions and frontal lobes BANFE-2, which were applied to both groups before and after the intervention. The experimental group participated in an 8-week computational thinking intervention during which its participants enrolled in plugged and unplugged activities and carried out block programming language twice a week. The results showed that the intervention had significant effects on executive functions associated with the anterior prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral cortex, but not those related to the orbitofrontal area.

While the potential of digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education for empowering children and for increasing their abilities to shape the society and our digital future have been acknowledged in the literature, these educational trends have mostly been studied separately in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research. Additionally, while digital fabrication and making have been discussed quite extensively in relation to the role of Design Protagonist in the CCI literature, the relevance of entrepreneurship education on this role remains quite unexplored. We combined digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education in a business innovation project with teenagers at school context. Through our qualitative, interpretive analysis, where we use value co-creation as our theoretical lens, we show what kind of value was expected and gained in this collaborative endeavor. Teachers valued learning new teaching methods and the possibilities of digital fabrication. Teens appreciated the change in scenery and routine and working on digital fabrication. They indicated learning useful things about the project topics during groupwork and experienced feelings of success related to their performance and the group project. We also identify challenges hindering value creation for teachers and students: differing expectations on the roles and responsibilities of adult participants, and difficulty balancing the fun, free making activities with the entrepreneurship aspects of the project. We discuss the implications of business innovation for the Design Protagonist role of children and identify balancing acts needed when supporting children to adopt the role for driving business innovation in the future digitalized society.

Despite growing attention to the social and ethical dimensions of Computer Science (CS), few practical resources exist to teach and learn CS through the lens of social responsibility. In Critically Conscious Computing, Ko and colleagues provide a comprehensive overview of foundational computing concepts with a sharp and needed critical perspective. In this review, we attend not only to the content of the book, but also to its format as a free, online, “living” text. The book is commendable for its tight integration of technical and socio-critical aspects of computing, approachable conversational style, and collection of flexible and practical resources for teachers. It would benefit from refinement of the integration chapters and a more explicit model for how educators themselves can approach new or different CS concepts through a critical frame. Overall, we strongly recommend this book for CS Educators at all levels for its balance of depth and practicality.

In order to design age-appropriate digital games, it is necessary to make better use of our existing knowledge about learning processes and adopt a true developmental perspective, as the impact of digital games can vary depending on the evolution of the child’s cognitive resources with age. The present study compared the impact of digital games that primarily elicit either explicit or implicit learning processes on the acquisition of uppercase letter names in preschoolers aged 3 to 5 years. During a 6-week play session, 144 children were invited to play with implicit or explicit learning-based games run on digital tablets at school individually during their free periods. Their knowledge of letter names, as well as that of the control group, was assessed before and after the play session. The results revealed that the implicit games were more effective than the explicit games and the control condition at ages 3 and 4. In contrast, the 5-year-olds’ knowledge of uppercase letter names improved the most with the explicit games when compared to the control group. Most importantly, this study illustrates the interest of studying the effectiveness of digital games by considering the cognitive processes they mobilize and the learner’s level of development.

As we push the boundaries of participatory design (PD) to empower children across the world, barriers to participation for those currently underserved require further attention. This includes neurodiverse individuals at special schools in India, whose day-to-day experiences are heavily influenced by the larger socio-cultural context of the schools comprising diverse stakeholders with diverse agendas and motivations. In this paper, we consider how-to PD at special schools in India. Employing the lenses of genuine participation and cultural translation, we critically examine two design projects with neurodiverse individuals: a gesture-based application to promote joint attention and using a mobile app to promote composting and entrepreneurial skills. We identified several challenges for adapting PD to the context of special schools in India. Reflecting on our experiences and coupled with previous literature on PD with similar contexts, we suggest potential solutions for these challenges. This includes how-to negotiate roles and responsibilities among stakeholders, handle conflicts among stakeholders’ socio-technical aspirations, balance power differentials and censorships, and identify possibilities for long-term real-world impact. Our work paves the way to adapt PD, from a provocation or privilege to a possibility, to empower neurodiverse individuals in all corners of the world.