In January 2018, Michael Levine participated in a panel conversation on young children’s media use hosted by Common Sense Media and the Brooklyn Public Library. Here, in the second of a two-part series, are some of his comments regarding the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight report. (See the first part here.)

 

The data from the Zero to Eight report showed that lower-income kids are spending much more time on devices than higher-income kids. If you just take that at face value, that could be cause for alarm. Yet how do we take into account different cultural norms and realities? What are your perspectives?

The higher media consumption patterns among lower-income families is cause for concern—the “always on” media does have developmental and educational equity consequences. An extra 90 minutes a day spent on media—especially if it is not advancing important skill sets—is probably not a great thing.

That said, we must avoid falling into a deficit approach in supporting low-income parents—who are often stressed by life circumstances and focused on staying employed, getting decent child care, and keeping their kids safe and sound. Media and technology are inexpensive and ubiquitous. And they can strengthen family ties and cultural capital. Our research, for example, documents many of the ways in which lower-income Hispanic and Latino families are integrating new forms of media sharing into their household routines and value-sets. Lower-income children do not have access to as many devices, but they are likely to share experiences and learn together—whether it is working on homework, playing games, or watching videos.

So my perspective is that we lecture and shame parents at our peril. Nothing good comes from that sort of expert advice—we have seen, for example, how ineffective the guidance of the AAP on screen time has been largely ignored in the past. Their more recent policies on screen time are certainly more balanced and likely to be heeded. Instead, we should focus on listening to and giving low-income families more guidance and tools to help them support children’s natural passions and interests. We need to view media and tech as neither the holy grail or the devil incarnate—they are only as effective as the human beings who deploy them.

While this report doesn’t talk about parents use of media, we know from other research at Common Sense that they spend just as much time with media and tech as tweens and teens do, and much more than our young kids. How does what we’re doing as adults, as parents, play into this conversation?

Of course, how a parent models behavior is very significant in shaping how a child will respond. Recently a master early childhood educator I know, Yvonne Smith, described the scene in her wonderful, very well-integrated preschool class in Manhattan. During pretend time she had a circle of her 4 and 5-year-olds pretending to be moms and dads. They had babies on their laps and were encouraged to sing, play, and talk to their young charges. Yvonne had recently introduced cell phones to the play area and she recounted the following scene—within three minutes, every one of the six preschoolers had reached for a phone and began texting their imaginary friends, while neglecting to interact with their babies.

This poignant reminder of just how closely children are watching us prompts me to want to spend a whole lot more time—as Ellen Galinsky might put it—listening to the children themselves. We need to stop wringing our hands about the always-on phenomenon and take a good look in the mirror.

Community organizations—from early learning centers to libraries to pediatricians—can play an important role in educating parents about how they can best support their kids with media and tech. But given the many different mandates and priorities they already have, how and where should discussions about this fit in? And just as importantly, how can we help ensure that the discussions are happening in a culturally sensitive way and where we’re not making parents feel like they’re doing something wrong?

Community organizations are already stepping up to the plate. I think that pediatricians and librarians especially have tremendous credibility to serve as media mentors—this is a relatively new role that is entering our lexicon so let me share how it is being defined. It is appropriate that we are sitting in one of the world’s great libraries having this conversation. According to the American Library Association, media mentors “support children and their families in their decisions and practice around media use. This role encompasses a variety of strategies for support, with each child or family requiring individual mentoring to ensure that support is respectful, culturally appropriate, and relevant. There are two recent books on the topic, Becoming a Media Mentor, by librarians Cen Campbell and Claudia Haines, and Family Engagement in the Digital Age: Early Childhood Educators as Media Mentors, a series of perspectives from educators, parents and community-based organizations collected by Chip Donahue of the Erikson Institute.

These books delve deeply into how community professionals can assess family strengths and assets and recruit diverse community leaders to serve as mentors and guides. They also include ways to activate culturally diverse communities to take on leadership roles in making media and tech more responsive and relevant.

Media production companies such as Sesame Workshop also have great responsibilities in this respect. This year’s theme for Sesame Street happens to be focused on cultivating cultural competencies.

What additional research do we need? What do you expect to find four years from now?

Ten years ago when we started the Cooney Center, I noted that our kids were entering the digital age of the Jetsons, while our research efforts were trapped in the age of the Flintstones. That was a bit dramatic, but the point was that we had a ton of research to do in order to catch up to the new dawn of technology. Today I would say that we know so much more about the ways in which good interactive media experiences can promote learning, but we still know woefully little about what works best for whom across different types of media and technology platforms. We also are not prioritizing the needs of low-income families and children in a way that will help prevent new divides from occurring. And 10 years after the introduction of the iPhone, we are still having difficulty keeping up with the pace of new technologies. I’ll mention three areas for more research:

• A Deeper Mobile Learning and Personalization Approach
  The exact definition of personalized learning is a work in progress: it is a buzz word that is being distorted by folks who have radically different visions of learning and teaching. But it is a visible response to our intuition that the old model of learning no longer holds. The more that an individual is not confined to books in her home or school library and has 24/7 access to a broader field of knowledge, the more that learning becomes personal as well as collectivized. Many choices equal many paths equal multiple ways to become educated. This is a huge challenge. Developers have not made as much progress as I would like to see in taking the unique affordances available to extend learning across settings and outside the screen. We don’t yet have a robust set of mobile learning theories to inform personalization. Still far too often we see educational apps, especially in the early literacy and math domains, tied to older versions of pedagogy—where discrete skill sets and rote knowledge are reskinned. There is an enormous call for using the new platforms and tech for personalized learning. I think we will see big R&D investments from tech pioneers such as Gates and Zuckerberg in the coming years to better define what exactly personalization—based on a new mix of a human-centered coach or mentor paired with new forms of machine learning for younger and younger kids. We will need to design and study what the anytime, anywhere learning classroom of the future looks like for young children in the next five years. It may not be our current version of preschool and the primary grades.
• Attention to Media Literacy
  In an era where “fake news,” “echo chamber inducing individualized search results,” and alternative facts are constantly ruminating, it is going to become more and more important to help educators, parents, and young children themselves assemble the habits of mind to critically assess, vet, and shape the information that is pouring into their skulls. We need a research to practice discipline to define a modern form of literacy—and pioneers like Common Sense Media and the Center for Media Literacy have started us in the right direction.
• Next Generation Technologies
  As the report finds, the adoption of new technologies like virtual and augmented reality and voice-activated assistants are just making their ways into homes. But there are enormous investments being made in these tech tools, and we expect they will influence younger and younger kids. It will be interesting to examine how these forms will influence social interaction and joint media engagement, physical health, and creative skills tied to story-telling and play-based learning. Can the promise of VR and AR, especially to build empathy and next generation learning capabilities, be fulfilled?

 

Learn more about the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight 2017.

In January 2018, Michael Levine participated in a panel conversation on young children’s media use hosted by Common Sense Media and the Brooklyn Public Library. Here, in the first of a two-part series, are some of his comments regarding the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight report. 

 

What does the research say about the effects of technology on kids’ development and learning? And based on this, what stood out to you in the data?

We know quite a bit, going back to the dawn of Sesame Street, on how media and technology affect children’s learning and healthy development. First, we know that too much exposure and inappropriate content—especially for very young children—is not a good thing. Early brain development benefits from consistent, joyful, and rich interactions between a child and caring adults—too much and the wrong kinds of media and technology can get in the way of those exchanges.

Second, we know that all media are not alike—there is a big difference in the impact that educational media and well-designed tech have on children’s learning versus the “empty calories” consumed while watching glorified toy commercials on YouTube, or being desensitized by conflict-ridden offerings. Parking a three-year-old in front of an IPad to play an hour on a poorly designed app is a good deal different from having the child engage in video chats with their grandparents or watching an hour of PBS or Sesame Street programming.

Third, well-designed tech drives active and shared engagement. In the best instances, media can be a tool to prompt rich conversations and to extend the learning beyond the screen, guided by a caring and intentional adult. A useful frame to judge how media and tech affect kids is to consider what Lisa Guernsey and I refer to in our book Tap, Click, Read as the 4 C’s—what is the quality of the content, is the setting or context in which media are being consumed likely to promote human connection, and how do the offerings build the passion or expertise of the individual child. We must also understand how media relate to the cultural and community needs of the child and their family. And the Zero to Eight study suggests that new programming and research is badly needed to attend to cultural and community differences in experiencing media and technology.

Two other priorities that the report suggests need attention are 1) an ongoing, more relentless focus on educational equity, and 2) a new public and professional consensus of what constitutes a “balanced digital diet.”

In the Cooney Center’s research, it is clear that inadequate access to media and technology—especially among low-income immigrant families—is a powerful barrier to learning and civic participation. In our recent report, Opportunity for All, we document a participation gap that has been closing in recent years, but is still quite potent. One in four low-income families have mobile-only access to the Internet—which makes it difficult for their kids to succeed in school. Try doing homework or project assignments on a cell phone, or signing up for health care or applying for a job—it’s daunting. The more serious concerns that Hispanic and Latino families voice about the threats to development that media and technology pose is also worth noting. Especially during a time where Hispanic and Latino families are being further marginalized by public policies and practices, we need to make sure that new digital divides do not grow. We cannot allow technology to exacerbate social inequalities instead of opening up new opportunities for everyone to succeed. There’s critical work to do in this regard.

Finally, we need more balance. I’m concerned that parents report that they are reading to their young children less, while watching more videos—which can may be a weak use of mobile access. But I’m also hopeful that mobile adoption has significant promise. The tools available today to young children have the potential to enhance their language, literacy and STEM skills, making them active explorers of everyday phenomenon—from their classroom to their community.

You may have heard that Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster has learned some valuable lessons in delaying his gratification and eating right. His favorite chocolate chip cookie is a “sometimes food,” part of a balanced diet of fruits, veggies and the occasional hubcap. The same needs to become true of children’s media diets. Some experiences that constitute empty calories should be limited, while others that are proven educational like Sesame Street can be more substantive staples. A compelling new book by Anya Kamenetz, The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life, offers wise and practical ideas on how parents and educators can successfully manage the new balancing act.

Mobile media has become a nearly universal part of the children’s media landscape, across all levels of society. And a lot of the excitement about the power of technology for learning is focused on apps and games, but we know that video watching is by far the most dominant activity. What are the implications of this? Is all screen time equal? 

All screen time is not equal! I am worried about the possible replacement of literacy activities for children under 3 with video watching or poorly designed apps. Our research has documented that the overwhelming majority of apps that label themselves as early literacy drivers are not backed by evidence to support that claim. And there are very few videos that have robust stand-alone literacy value for very young children beyond the ability to label or categorize objects.

What is most interesting is the significant narrowing of the “app gap” as mobile device ownership has become more universal. But as that gap narrows, are we providing parent and professional supports to ensure that vulnerable kids will benefit from greater access? Not yet.

Our research suggests that many parents, particularly those with lower incomes, may not feel confident with technology themselves, nor do they have the mentoring and support to find or use the highest quality content with their children to maximum advantage. And while the report suggests that young children are increasingly facile in operating mobile technologies, we don’t know yet how to best drive educational and home-based practices to extend learning and development beyond the screen. New programs that support trusted media mentors such as librarians and pediatricians and which offer professional development on the effective use of digital media for early educators are now very much needed. A great source of innovative thinking and practical models for supporting media mentors is provided in the pioneering work of Chip Donahue at Erikson Institute’s TEC Center.

 

Read the second installment of “What Does the Research Say About Tech and Kids’ Learning?” 

 

 

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Originator.

Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast. My name is Carissa Christner and today I’m very excited to bring to you an interview with Rex Ishibashi of the Originator apps.

Originator is most well known for the Endless apps, like Endless Alphabet and Endless Reader. They are great apps for teaching reading, vocabulary, and math skills. When people ask me, “What’s the one app that you can recommend to help my child learn to read?” Endless Apps are pretty much the first ones I recommend.

Rex Ishibashi: Thank you. It’s great being here. 

CC: Let’s start off with some basics. Where are you guys located?

RI: We are located largely in the San Francisco Bay area. We’re a team of five. Four of us are based in the Bay Area and one of us is actually down in Los Angeles. By and large we work virtually from our homes.

CC: Have you been with Originator since it first started?

RI: I am one of the founders, yes. In fact, I consider our entire team of five to be founders. We were all together at a company prior that was doing some kids’ apps, and decided to venture out on our own to start Originator together. 

CC: So you’ve got history with everybody, which makes it maybe a little easier to communicate with each other?

RI: It sure does, and it makes the virtual workspace that I described possible. There’s a lot of trust and natural chemistry between us, and a willingness to go outside of our comfort zones to do things we’ve never done. It makes the job fun. Sometimes challenging, but certainly fun.

CC: We’ve been talking [in past episodes] with app developers about how they make their artwork. Can you tell us a little bit about your process?

RI: All the art and animations in the apps are digitally produced. The Endless series is done in 2D, with all of the artwork done in Illustrator or Flash. We’re also working on a new math app for older kids, ages 6 to 9. That will be our first 3D app and we’re developing all the artwork in Maya.

…

CC: So on your small staff, do any of you have a history in education? I think you’ve got some really solid educational philosophy behind [your apps] and I’m curious if you have someone on staff or if you consult with someone?

RI: We don’t have professional educators [on staff], but we do have our own philosophies about education and what works—and certainly what works in a digital environment. Over the course of developing the seven Endless Apps, we’ve learned quite a bit through testing, feedback from our users, and feedback from educators who are using our apps in classrooms. 

CC: That actually raises my next question: How do you do app testing?

RI: We test all of our apps with kids. Generally speaking, we run each app through two to four rounds of testing. Each test group is quite small, only three to five kids. What we’ve learned over time is that, yeah, it’s nice to have feedback from 25 kids, but it takes longer and is far more tiring. Most importantly, by the time you get through three to five kids, you have pretty clear headlines as far as what’s working—and what isn’t.

We have relationships with parent groups, a few preschools, and [elementary] schools in the Bay Area. They’re happy to have us come in for an hour or so to run testing with a few kids.

…

CC: Have you had any particular words that you’ve wanted to use, but think, “I don’t know how in the world we’re going to illustrate that with an animation”?

RI: We have, and I’m trying to think of examples… (CC: Enigma?) Funny you should say that—it’s on the list of words that has never made it to the app in Endless Alphabet, “rare words.” We think of them as words that kids love to say because they are complicated, oftentimes with a rhythm and cadence.

There was a morning when my then 3-year-old son woke up on a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco, and he walked up to the window and said, “It’s gorgeous outside!” Gorgeous is a word that my wife uses quite frequently to refer to weather when it’s beautiful. [Hearing a young] child use a [shorter] word like “pretty” can be a million dollar moment, so having them use a word like gorgeous or gargantuan or experiment is priceless.

 

CC: So at this point are you adding more words [to the Endless apps]?

RI: We are no longer adding words. We’ve always taken the approach of launching an app with the quote unquote bare minimum, seeing how it was received seeing if the app worked and then expanding from there.

As it turns out, we’ve expanded all of our apps. Endless Alphabet launched with 26 words, now it has 100. Endless Reader, which is centered around the Dolch and Fry Sight Words, started with 26 words and it’s now up to 350. Endless Wordplay started off with 90 words in 30 lessons, and now has 270 words and 90 lessons. Endless Numbers started off with 25 numbers and now has 100. Endless Spanish started with 27 words (because of the additional letter in the Spanish language) and now it goes up to 100 words.

…

CC: Can you talk a little bit about your subscription model for Endless Learning Academy?

RI: Sure. You know the subscription model is something we always had in the back of our mind, even when we were developing Endless Alphabet. We’ve learned a lot in terms of pricing, how to present the subscription offer, etc. What we realized is that one size doesn’t fit all with respect to how families want to consume media, and what their budgets allow. The best analogy I can use is that some families want to rent a movie and have it streamed to them, and some families want to own it.

CC: That’s a good analogy. I’m thankful that you’re going to keep both options. I can see an argument for both sides, and I like being able to present them both when I talk to parents about the Endless Apps at the library!

 

 

If you were born after 1990, are the parent or grandparent of someone born after 1990, or a children’s media producer of any age, Ready To Learn (RTL) has probably touched your life. Launched in 1994, RTL is a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that provides about $25 million annually for the creation of educational media (TV, computer games, apps, and more) designed to promote school readiness. RTL funding has gone to the production of legacy media properties that existed long before the initiative, like Sesame Street, as well as newer media properties, like Ready Jet Go! RTL media targets all children, with special outreach to low-income and racial-ethnic minority populations. Most U.S. preschoolers have watched RTL TV or played RTL games, with especially high rates of RTL media consumption in at-risk communities.

When I was completing my doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University, I wanted to know whether RTL media is really working. In a research study that I recently had published in the academic journal Child Development, I asked whether exposure to RTL media had a positive impact on young children’s early literacy skills. To answer this question, I compiled every evaluation of RTL media I could get my hands on. In total, I gathered together 45 evaluations conducted over RTL’s 20+ year history and involving 24,624 kids ages 2-8. About two-thirds of these evaluations were led by researchers who received sub-contracts from RTL grant recipients (referred to later in this post as RTL-funded researchers), and the remaining evaluations were conducted independently. I extracted statistical information from these evaluations to conduct a meta-analysis – a type of review that averages across many different research studies to yield robust findings about how well something works.

Overall, I found that RTL media were indeed successful in promoting early literacy, especially vocabulary and alphabetics (knowledge of English letter sounds). Exposure to RTL media resulted in about 8 percentiles or 1.5 months of literacy development above and beyond typical growth. This is about equivalent to Head Start’s impact on children’s early learning (although of course Head Start also provides a host of services not found in media, like medical care). Effects were about the same regardless of whether kids watched RTL shows or played RTL computer games/apps. The media were more effective for preschool than elementary school students and for Native Americans (an RTL target population in some markets). Below, I share additional findings from this study and discuss implications for producers, research professionals, policymakers, and parents.

Producers

Producers are doing a great job making educational content, but there’s a need to continue creating media that promotes and reinforces the same kinds of core literacy skills already featured in RTL media (knowledge of the letters and sounds of the alphabet, vocabulary, and knowledge of basic English writing conventions). Many RTL media properties that received grant funding at one point and were successful at helping children learn are no longer in production.

There’s also room to focus on other literacy skills not covered as well in existing RTL assets, or to focus on promoting literacy for school-age children. I found in this study that RTL media was not consistently successful at promoting narrative comprehension, which is a tricky skill for kids to master before elementary school. Media promoting narrative comprehension—perhaps simply by featuring storylines with a beginning, middle, and end—might fill a gap in the marketplace. During the current RTL grant cycle, producers are focusing on promoting an appreciation for non-fiction or informational texts—which is an area rarely covered in older RTL assets.

Research Professionals

The reviewer critiques I received while publishing this study made me realize that there may be value in RTL-funded researchers being more transparent about their work. I know from reading myriad RTL evaluations that the average study led by RTL-funded researchers was conducted by an experienced team, resulting in a detailed report in the 50- to 100-page range. It’s that level of detail that made this study possible. However, the Child Development reviewers were skeptical about the quality of RTL-funded research, complaining that studies could be hard to track down and often not indexed in traditional academic databases. They were concerned that something fishy might be afoot—that RTL-funded researchers might be hiding unfavorable results or entire evaluations. Posting hypotheses and measures in advance of conducting studies might assuage these concerns. It would also be helpful if all RTL research—across grant cycles and conducted by disparate groups—was saved in a unified database. This could make it easier for outsiders to track down and potentially benefit from the research.

It would further be beneficial if more researchers with independent sources of funding chose to conduct research studies using RTL media as stimuli. Such research would provide stronger evidence for or against the continued funding of the RTL initiative. There’s no reason to fear doing so. This study demonstrates that RTL media can be effective and that RTL research is publishable and can be theoretically impactful.

Policymakers

For those making or advising educational policy, the main takeaway of this study is clear: RTL should continue to be funded. RTL media are reaching the majority of American preschoolers and have positive impacts on early literacy. RTL is able to accomplish this with a relatively tiny budget compared to other educational expenditures (the annual budget for Head Start is over $9 billion, compared to RTL’s ~$25 million).

In crafting the RTL calls for proposals, it would also be helpful for policymakers to continue to allow and encourage producers to focus on the same skills across multiple grant cycles. The 2005-2010 RTL grant cycle focused on literacy, 2010-2015 focused on literacy and math, and 2015-2020 focused on literacy and science. In this study, RTL’s effects on literacy increased across grant cycles. I suspect content producers may have become more experienced at promoting literacy over time. I further guess producers would continue honing their craft to develop continuously stronger mathematics and science content if incentivized to do so over extended periods of time.

Parents

If your child is going to watch TV or use screen media, choosing content funded by RTL is a pretty safe bet. The odds are good this content will be educationally beneficial. A lot of RTL’s TV content airs on PBS. PBS provides information about the current grant-funded media properties here, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting maintains this landing page with the latest RTL news.

If you’re able, it’s also immensely helpful to watch educational TV or play educational apps/computer games with your child to support their learning. My study further suggests that kids may benefit from doing learning activities related to the educational messages in this media. Many RTL-funded TV shows offer activities that parents or teachers can lead to complement and extend children’s learning from the media. Some shows even have an activity or set of activities corresponding to every single episode. Activities for shows airing on PBS can be found here and here. Just click on your child’s favorite show to see if it has show-related activities.

In conclusion, consuming RTL media content is a valuable use of children’s time, especially for preschool-age children, and initiatives such as RTL are a wise investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars. The findings from this massive dataset underscore RTL’s value. That said, there’s still more work for us to do as producers, research professionals, policymakers, and parents.

For more on this study, check out the full scientific article.

 

Lisa B. Hurwitz, PhD conducted the research described in this blog post while working at the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University. She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and will soon join Lexia Learning as a Lead Researcher. Dr. Hurwitz’s research leverages evaluation theory to study children’s learning from media/technology and related policy questions. Beyond the study discussed in this blog post, her other scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Computers in Human Behavior, and Health Communication; received recognition from the International Communication Association and Society for Research on Child Development; and been featured in news outlets, including the Chicago Tribune and Education Week.

“For me, my kids playing Halo is no different than playing outside and coming up with scenarios that seem kind of violent like our kids… they could be outside playing Nerf guns and pretending to shoot each other and die. I can go outside and play Nerf guns with my kids and we can be playing in the neighborhood. And I don’t get questioned about that, but I get questioned about Halo.” —Abigail, a mother of four daughters

Between the World Health Organization’s classification of video game “addiction” as a mental condition and the blaming of video games for yet another school shooting, it can be difficult to imagine video games as a context for positive learning and connection for youth and families nowadays. But perhaps this is the best time to weigh the negativity surrounding video games in the mainstream media against the growing evidence of their positive cognitive, social, and emotional benefits. Let’s engage in a discussion about the potential of this medium for supporting adults and children in learning about themselves, each other, and the world.

The Families at Play: Connecting and Learning through Video Games book I co-authored with Elisabeth Gee, a fellow researcher at Arizona State University, aims to broaden the public conversation around video games by focusing on the diverse ways video games support family connection, learning, and communication. Written with a broad audience in mind, the book is a collection of five different research and design projects that span a decade. These projects range from interviews with parents and children to observations of families playing popular commercial video games at their homes, as well as games that are intentionally designed to promote intergenerational play across the boundaries of different educational settings (such as home, school, museums, and libraries).

There is something for everyone in our 216-page book. If you are a parent, you will enjoy reading about how other parents are using video games with their children to promote a sense of closeness and togetherness. Just like sharing their favorite music with their children, parents enjoy introducing video games that they played growing up, and later as adults, to their children. Playing video games is one of many mediated activities (both digital and nondigital) that children do around an interest that is personal to them. At the same time, children’s video gaming can be a linchpin in the family system that bonds multiple generations.

Not all parents who participated in our projects played video games with their children. The national data on family gaming suggests that the percentage of parents who play video games with their children is relatively small. It also falls into gender lines: fathers are more likely to play video games with their children than mothers. That said, throughout the book, you will find examples of mothers from diverse educational, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds playing all kinds of video games with their children for a wide variety of reasons. And while the degree to which families engaged with video games together varied, we observed that video gaming is a family routine and ritual in many households. (For those who are looking to get started, we make suggestions in Chapter 4.)

Our book is also relevant to educators and game designers who play an important role in productively engaging families in learning and connecting through video games. The cases we share and the themes we discuss throughout the book provide insights into the users, namely families, for whom educators and game designers create experiences. In Chapter 6, we specifically discuss the structures and design principles that emerged from our work as being useful in creating opportunities to broaden the participation of parents and children in video gaming. Further, researchers in communication, education, learning sciences, game studies, and human-computer interaction will find the cases that draw on interviews, surveys, and observations of more than 100 families illuminative in understanding families as a whole, as well as their perspectives and engagement with video games.

What motivated us to write this book? Of course, the persistent negativity surrounding video games is one reason. But that’s not all. The debate around “screen time” continues to dominate public discourse and perpetuate parents’ negative perceptions of video games. It often foregrounds ideas such as “unplugging” and “media diet” that implicitly position parents as gatekeepers of their children’s media use rather than participants in their learning around digital media. Further, not all screen time is equal. An hour of watching YouTube, using social media, or playing video games have different affordances for learning and connecting with others. What is most exciting about video games is their ability to immerse different generations in an interactive problem space where players are invited to take on the roles of teachers and learners, collaborating, negotiating differences, and developing shared understandings. Finally, we wanted to challenge the narrow definition of “family-friendly games” and inspire the design of games and game-based experiences that are more inclusive and responsive to the needs of families with diverse backgrounds.

In our book, we draw upon scholarship around parenting, families, learning, and technology to provide a context for findings from our own research and to expand the conversation around video games. We propose that, for children, successful participation in the 21st century starts with intergenerational play experiences at home around technology. Video gaming in particular can be a promising context for parents and children to work as collaborative partners and develop skills that can transfer to other contexts (such as the workplace). We discuss different forms of family engagement with video games that we believe support the formation and cultivation of what Seymour Papert calls “a family learning culture” at home.

Although families have been playing sports games, board games, and card games together for decades, if not centuries, intergenerational play around video games has been less frequent. It is time to change that.

 

Sinem Siyahhan, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Educational Technology and Learning Sciences at California State University San Marcos, and the Founding Director of Play2Connect, an initiative that aims to support family learning, communication, and connection through gaming. Throughout the last decade, Sinem has researched and designed educational video games and applications, and game-based learning experiences and programs for youth and families in schools, museums, and libraries. She was a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Emerging Scholar, and a Science and Technology Fellow for the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education. She is the co-author of Families at Play: Connecting and Learning through Video Games.

Twitter: @sinemsyh