Children’s literature is not known for its diversity—either in terms of diverse characters within books, diverse authors and illustrators, or diverse staff within the publishing industry. Nancy Larrick’s famous article, “The All White World of Children’s Books,” was published in 1965, and sadly, the situation is not that different today. Yet those responsible for putting books in the hands of children know how important it is that books for young people provide what Rudine Sims Bishop calls “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.” In a 2014 New York Times article, celebrated author Walter Dean Myers pointed out that of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about African Americans. In April 2014, young adult authors Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo tweeted about the lack of diversity in Children’s Literature, using the hashtag #weneeddiversebooks. Their conversation launched a movement.

In summer 2014, Marianne Martens participated in a panel of librarians presenting apps at the American Library Association’s annual conference. When she was putting together her list of recommended apps for the presentation, she realized the app business mirrored the publishing industry—there was a serious lack of diverse apps to choose from. Martens wrote a blog post for the ALSC blog, and later, was asked to join the Kids Inclusive and Diverse Media Action Project, or KIDMAP (formerly known as “Diversity in Apps”) as a founding board member. In 2015, Design Professor Gretchen Rinnert, from Kent State University, was putting together a seed grant for an iOS alphabet app for preschoolers and asked Martens to participate.

Gretchen Rinnert was inspired to create the Energetic Alpha app because she had become frustrated looking for quality educational apps in the Apple Store for her own children. While many apps claimed to be both “high-quality” and “educational,” after examining many of them, she found that these terms were being very loosely defined. In the case of “free” apps, this perfect price point (from the consumer’s perspective) often comes with annoying in-app advertising, many security and privacy issues, and typically, the user must pay for app upgrades in order to unlock the most interesting interactive or educational features.

Energetic Alpha is a learning app that helps preliterate children learn to recognize letters in the English language, practice proper handwriting skills, and build their vocabulary of verbs. The app is essentially an interactive alphabet book that helps children learn how to write letters through responsive and animated feedback. If a child writes a letter backwards, the system responds by providing both audio feedback and visual cues for correction. Then when the child is successful, the app plays a video of a corresponding verb: for example, A is for appear, B is for build, and C is for camouflage, and so forth.

The design team wanted to create an app that was high-quality, educational, and inclusive. For us, inclusivity occurs on two levels—first in terms of depicting diverse children and voices within the app, and second, in terms of ensuring that our team of co-design kids represented a diverse group of individuals.

In 2016, Alaskan librarian Claudia Haines created an 11-question rubric to help parents, teachers, and librarians identify and evaluate quality digital content for children. In 2018, the KIDMAP team enlisted a team of experts to publish an expanded rubric to include criteria for finding material that is “inclusive, equitable, and accessible”. While both Haines’ rubric and the KIDMAP rubric are intended as tools for evaluation, we used them as tools for informing both the app’s design and the methodology in our study.

In order to create Energetic Alpha, we developed our child-centered methodology, which borrows from Allison Druin’s cooperative inquiry and Elizabeth Sanders co-creation. We also intentionally used guidelines from KIDMAP’s DIG Checklist, making sure that diverse children appear within the app, and in our user-study group.

Since our app was not a storytelling app, some of the DIG Checklist questions were not relevant to our project. But there was other criteria that we could address, such as:

• Are characters diverse in their culture, ethnicity, language, gender, age, social classes, physical features, sexual orientation, and ability, reflecting today’s diverse families?
• Are diverse characters meaningfully integrated as individuals?

Despite our efforts, our study had many limitations, and only represents baby steps toward inclusive app design. With a research and design team that was entirely Caucasian, we failed at one criteria from the DIG Checklist:

• Who are the members of the creative team? Who is the author, illustrator, developer, educational or cultural consultant?

In addition, our user study was small, which means that our results are not generalizable. Despite this, we hope that our efforts towards inclusive app design will encourage others to consciously and automatically embed diversity and inclusion into their own app design. We know that we will.

 

References:

Druin A. (2005). What children can teach us: Developing digital libraries for children with children. The Library Quarterly, 75(1): 20-41.

Larrick, N. (1965). The all-white world of children’s books. Saturday Review, 48(11), 63-65.

Martens, M., Rinnert, G. C., Andersen, C. (2018, December). Child-centered design: Developing  an inclusive letter writing app. Frontiers in Psychology. (Special edition on Human Computer Interaction:  Interactive Digital Technologies and Early Childhood). Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02277

Sanders, E. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts 4(1): 5-18.

Sims Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 1 (3), ix–xi.     

 

Marianne Martens, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at Kent State University’s School of Information. Her research interests in the area of “digital youth” converge at the intersection of books and technology in new literary formats and include the impact of digital reading experiences and the multi-literacies required to interpret non-linear, multimodal materials. You can read more about her work at mariannemartens.org.

 

Gretchen Caldwell Rinnert, M.G.D. is an associate professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. She teaches interaction design, motion design, visual ethics, and design theory. As a researcher, her work focuses on the intersection of design and education, classroom participation, and tools that aid in understanding and comprehension. Since 2015 she has been working on a suite of tools that help preliterate children learn letters and numbers. Rinnert is also one of the founding members of the MODE Summit, a motion design educators summit that takes place every two years and is a peer-reviewed, international event. You can visit her website at   http://www.flyingtype.com

 

On June 15, 2019, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and foundry10 will host the 2019 Interaction Design & Children conference workshop on Immersive Media and Child Development. The aim of this workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers, practitioners, and other experts who are interested in the responsible design of immersive media for children, while taking into account children’s developmental needs, equity, and inclusivity.

Immersive media in this context includes augmented, virtual, cross, and mixed reality. More than and different from other media, immersive media have the potential to affect children’s imagination, empathy, and experiential, embodied learning. We also believe there are possibilities for these media to create more inclusive, equitable lives for children or exclusive, inequitable ones; to close or widen digital divides; and to empower or disempower children. This is not only because immersive media impart the feeling of really “being there,” blurring the lines between what is real and what is not, but also because young children have difficulty developmentally in distinguishing truth from fiction. Therefore, these media may be powerfully harmful or beneficial, depending on how systems and their messages are deployed.

Our workshop comes at a critical time when many immersive media systems are not yet approved to be used by children under age 13, but, at the same time, are becoming more commercially available and affordable for adult consumers. Before these media become pervasive in children’s lives, we want to be proactive in ensuring that immersive media hardware, software, and content are designed with children’s development, equity, and inclusivity in mind.

Together, at the workshop, we will discuss and make connections across our work, participate in hands-on activities, and begin producing a set of design guidelines for immersive media for children, grounded in our collective experience, research, and knowledge of the field. We will publish these guidelines as a white paper after the workshop to distribute them to interested industries, developers, designers, and more to positively impact the future of childhood.

Now, we invite interested participants to submit a short position paper that includes their research/interest area, what they hope to get out of the workshop, and a brief personal bio (2-4 pages in CHI Extended Abstract format, new or old). We welcome participants who work with children and immersive media or who have knowledge about children that may apply to the design of immersive media for children, regardless of any experience with these systems.  At least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop by registering for both the workshop and the main conference. Email submissions to futureofchildhood [at] sesame.org by April 5, 2019.

For more information, visit the workshop website: https://imdc-workshop.wixsite.com/idc2019.

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Jeremy Bailenson, PhD, is the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and the author of Experience on Demand. Here he offers insights into some of the ways these technologies might affect basic human behaviors.

 

I am going to treat VR and AR separately, as I think the psychological processes and effects are very distinct for the two technologies.

Augmented reality

The greatest impact of AR on childhood will surround multitasking. By definition, AR “registers” digital objects in the physical world, and allows users to hear, see, and in 10 years, very likely to smell and somewhat likely to touch them. The game Pokémon Go was not a fad, and last month, tens of millions of people played. Preliminary research at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (we have just begun two separate NSF-funded projects to test how AR changes basic social behavior) indicates that AR changes performance and nonverbal behavior. People change where they look, where they sit, and how they walk in physical room when there are AR objects rendered onto goggles they are wearing. At scale imagine a classroom where each child is seeing different digital objects and digital colleagues in addition to the same set of physical ones. Common ground, to quote Herb Clark, will be shattered, in that people will experience different versions of AR reality while physically co-present. One initial finding from our studies shows that social behavior is impacted. On a positive note, we have replicated “social facilitation” effects—college students perform an easy task better when an AR-embodied agent watches them (compared to being alone). On a negative note, an AR event outlasts the experience, and people will avoid sitting in chairs where they previously saw an AR event occur. The benefits to “beaming in” other people will be transformative in terms of uniting people who live far away, removing travel that is considered prohibitive, and ultimately changing the structure of commuting to work and school. But they will change basic patterns of attention and performance in a way that is unprecedented.

Consider one of the most popular video games for the Microsoft Hololens, called Fragments. The game uses the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm to scan one’s physical room, and then changes the layout of narrative events of the game so that they “fit” into the room when projected onto the goggles. A murder occurs in one’s physical living room, where both characters are perfectly standing on the floor and not intersecting a wall. Similarly, there is a window which is rendered on a wall to look like an actual window in your room. Fast forward 10 years, and imagine watching a scary movie in your bedroom. The antagonists will literally be climbing on your bed.

Virtual reality

The biggest concern around VR 10 years from now will be reality blurring. The phenomenon has been studied, though we only have a few studies. Jakki Bailey, who is at the conference, can discuss her pioneering work. In addition, a small-sample study by Kathryn Segovia has shown that young children can confuse VR events from actual ones one week later. Ten years from now, the video and audio fidelity of VR and AR will be close enough to fool the perceptual system. I also suspect scent will be close to perfect, as rendering scent now is pretty easy (clearing the scene is challenging as there is no “refresh” for molecules). For better or worse, we will be able to produce digital experiences 10 years from now that will be, from a perceptual standpoint, perfectly real. So childhood will be defined by a paradox—any child can experience the most fantastical experience imaginable by programmers, but the perceptual system will treat it as a real one. This is a pretty unique moment in human evolution.

Addiction

For both AR and VR, a theme to discuss will be addiction. We have very little empirical data on addiction to VR and AR. Of course there is plenty of work on gaming, but most of that surrounds reward/punishment schedules, not perceptual realism, integration into one’s body via tracking, and multi-sensory feedback. To my knowledge there is no study that randomly assigns people to tons of VR/AR use yet, but someone should study this (attendees, please take note). However, most research on “presence” in VR shows that immersive scenes are more engaging and persuasive than non-immersive ones.

 

 

Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a Faculty Leader at Stanford’s Center for Longevity. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor. He is the author of Experience on Demand.

On October 26, 2018, over 50 key stakeholders in early education gathered at the Idaho Early STEM Summit in Boise. Led by the Idaho STEM Action Center (STEM AC), this convening of professionals—comprised of representatives from research institutions, government agencies, libraries, and community-based organizations—is the first of its kind in the state to focus on advocacy for STEM opportunities for young children ages birth through age 8.

Boise State University’s College of Education opened our morning with a presentation on what the research says about early STEM. Drs. Deborah Carter and Yvette Mere-Cook identified children’s inborn drive to make sense of their world and their ability to construct knowledge alongside engaged adults. Their groundwork on inquiry-based learning, best practices and common verbiage articulated an overarching call to action for STEM in Idaho early education. Armed with this information, attendees broke off into both region- and organization-specific groups to first define our current deficiencies in early STEM education, brainstorm ideas for personal actions, and develop programmatic objectives to begin the process of systems building for an early STEM network. The groups hammered out seven areas of focus: 1) current early learning centers; 2) early STEM methodology; 3) professional development needs; 4) family engagement; 5) current ecosystem and shared resources; 6) existent systems; and 7) hindrances to our vision.

For our keynote, Boise City Councilwoman Lisa Sanchez delivered a moving speech about ways to mitigate barriers for and reach underrepresented communities to participate in early STEM education programs. She began with the challenges she overcame while growing up poor in a small rural town in southeastern Idaho. She was the first of her family to graduate from college, and went on to become the first Latina to campaign for and win a seat on the Boise City Council. Ms. Sanchez’s work with various underrepresented groups has helped her understand that those that have truly made a difference didn’t necessarily come from the same community nor speak a common language. Where words can’t connect people, she said, “reach out and authentically speak love over others. People understand how you make them feel, allowing them to feel they belong. Only then can our young children in the underrepresented populations have the safety to begin engagement in STEM learning.”

During the afternoon, we held breakout sessions that highlighted the creation and selection process of grants for 7-15 early STEM pilot programs. The pilot programs will be supported by research from Boise State University as well as resources from Idaho Public Television, Idaho Commission for Libraries, Idaho Out-of-School Network, and the STEM AC.

In January 2019, we were pleased to announce the recipients: 10 sites have been awarded grants to provide training and materials for early education practitioners and caregivers in rural communities to engage young children in inquiry-based STEM education through play. Each program will send two early educators to a seven-hour hands-on early STEM foundational training in early spring in preparation to create family engagement events in early STEM. Eight of these programs have Spanish speaking staff to facilitate these projects.

In the summer of 2019, the early STEM network will reconvene to evaluate the pilot programs, reflect on lessons learned and set new goals and an action plan for future activities.

The Early STEM Summit was made possible with support from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop as part of the Families Learning Across Boundaries (FamLAB) Spark Grants Program through the generous support of the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, and Oath Foundation.

 

 

Erica Compton is an Idaho native with over 30 years of experience in hands-on STEM education and training. In February of 2010 Erica joined the Idaho Commission for Libraries as a Project Coordinator. She co-developed the Make It at the Library project with the goal of strengthening STEAM skills and supporting entrepreneurship for people of all ages through maker-centered learning. Erica has had the privilege of participating in the Maker Movement at a national level through a variety of presentations and committee memberships including the Capitol Hill Maker Faire, Mayors Conference on Entrepreneurship, and the National Advisory Board on 3D Printing in Education & Accessibility. She joined the Idaho STEM Action Center as Program Manager in November 2015 and oversees grant development and management, best practice research and dissemination, and building partnerships with STEM organizations nationwide.