On June 15, 2019, we—along with the JGCC’s Deputy Director and Head of Research Lori Takeuchi and foundry10’s Co-founder and CEO Lisa Castaneda—convened a group of experts at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference in Boise, Idaho to participate in a one-day workshop on kids and immersive media.  At this workshop, we focused on how to ensure immersive media—or augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR)—for kids is designed responsibly by taking into account kids’ developmental needs, equity, and inclusivity.

Building off the Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development last November, we joined together at IDC to continue to be proactive about design in this area. This is important because immersive media, despite some industry recommendations that they not be used by kids under 13, are already growing quickly in popularity for children of all ages. And, whether experienced through head-mounted displays like Oculus Quest or Google Cardboard, a typical smartphone, or special systems like Osmo, these immersive experiences present exciting opportunities for learning, creativity, exploration, health and well-being, access, empowerment, and more, while at the same time raising concerns for how using immersive technologies may adversely affect kids’ physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional development. Expanding where children can “go” and what they can “do” beyond what is possible in the physical, unmediated world in extremely realistic ways, these technologies are different from other types of technologies and media. Therefore, we need to get ahead of the curve by reflecting on what we know now to ensure that kids can engage with immersive media productively and safely in the future.

This year’s IDC was a great place to do this work. With the conference theme “Live Healthy: Design, Create, and Explore,” it featured a wide variety of relevant work, including papers about mixed reality technology designed for and by children (see MaR-T: Designing a Projection Based Mixed Reality System for Nonsymbolic Math Development of Preschoolers and “I’m Drowning in Squirrels!”: How Children Embody and Debug Computational Algorithms Through Designing Mixed Reality Games), as well as a panel discussion about current ethical concerns in interactive design for children and a workshop on including children with special needs in the design process. By getting together at this design-centered conference, we hoped to focus on using our collective experiences, research, and knowledge of the field to begin to develop recommendations for the design and development of AR, VR, and MR for kids. 

Workshop participants were able to try out some VR games. Lori Takeuchi plays Beat Saber. (Photo by Kiley Sobel)

Our twelve workshop participants included researchers and designers from academia, nonprofits, and industry. They brought perspectives from public health, mental health, teaching and learning, participatory design, technology/software design and development, and more; and they offered expertise on children of all ages (3 years up to 18 years and beyond). Importantly, all of these participants consider issues of equity and inclusion as key threads in their work.

In terms of programming, our workshop started with a short game and introductions to share our unique backgrounds. Next we tackled an initial discussion to untangle differences, affordances, and limitations of the different forms of immersive media along various dimensions (e.g., social, psychological, and physical considerations, what types of learning each is best suited for, etc.). For example, one group discussed how virtual reality can give children the feeling of traveling to a place they could never visit in real life, whereas augmented reality might allow them to learn new things about objects in their everyday environment. Through this conversation, we also found that the definitions of AR, MR, and VR across our various fields were not always so clear cut, making our untangling even more difficult. Then, small groups met throughout the rest of the day to brainstorm and generate design recommendations based on these different potentials and challenges.

Through our discussions, we generated some initial design recommendations, including:

• Design for collaboration between and among children, adults, teachers, etc.
• Include easy exit pathways for children to quickly stop an experience or remove a device if needed
• Create ways for children to preview content before experiencing it
• Allow for agency and exploration

A few key questions we encountered were:

• Can design recommendations cover all types of immersive media together, or is there a need to be more specific? (Similarly, the XR Association has created a developer’s guide for VR and AR but doesn’t focus on children.)
• How can cultural relevance, socioeconomic diversity, and accessibility and inclusion all be considered? (Since our workshop, the XR Access community has started tackling immersive media and accessibility!)
• What new research do we need to do vs. what can we glean from already conducted research on immersive media (with and without kids) and on other technologies for kids? 

After this productive day, we are excited to move forward in our creation of recommendations for immersive media designers and developers. Our next step includes engaging additional stakeholders, primarily industry designers, but also parents and families, pediatricians, and other experts who were not part of this first workshop. With their guidance, we will create a report to share on the responsible design of immersive media for kids. We look forward to sharing this work in 2020!

For more information about this workshop, you can read our workshop proposal in the Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library and check out our website for updates.

Sam Bindman is a research psychologist who studied Psychology at Grinnell College and earned her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, where she spearheaded innovative research using voice recorders to study parent-child conversations at home. Sam’s current projects include exploring the potential for Virtual Reality to foster learning for students of all ages both in and out of the classroom, the promise of dramatic arts for engaging young children in learning, and the role of technology in family life for both young children and youth learning to navigate the digital world.

Kiley Sobel is a Research Scientist at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she focuses on the responsible, inclusive, and equitable design of and standards for emerging technologies and new media for children to ensure that we positively impact the future of childhood. Prior to the Cooney Center, Kiley completed her PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. 

At the XR for Change Summit in New York City in June 2019, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center hosted a cross-disciplinary panel of experts to discuss the potential impact and pitfalls of virtual reality (VR) in the classroom. Michael Preston, the Cooney Center’s executive director, kicked off the session with a call to take advantage of VR’s relative youthfulness to ensure that content and hardware developed for learning are beneficial and safe for children. The panel was moderated by David Kleeman, SVP of global trends at Dubit, and featured participants Bruce Homer, director of the Child Interactive Learning and Development (CHILD) Center at CUNY Graduate Center of New York, Brooke Morrill, director of education at Schell Games, and Craig Watkins, founding director of the Institute for Media Innovation at UT Austin.

Photo: Games for Change
From left: David Kleeman, Craig S. Watkins, Brooke Morrill, Bruce Homer, and Michael Preston

David Kleeman opened the discussion by noting that while kids are incredibly enthusiastic about VR, that excitement doesn’t appear to last—Dubit’s research showed that when children were provided with PlayStation VR bundles to use at home, the novelty seemed to wear off after a few days and the devices were consigned to the toy bin. Yet in spite of VR’s struggle to sustain children’s engagement at home, this technology presents promising opportunities for learning. Could it be that rather than the consumer market, the VR content and hardware industry should be focusing on the education market? What will it take to make VR viable in the classroom, and not just a novelty to be tried once and cast aside? Can it fulfill educational needs in a cost-effective way?

Here are the key takeaways from the conversation.

Keep in mind the developing child:

Bruce Homer pointed to the importance of keeping in mind that children—the learners—are physical beings, whose cognitive and physical development go hand in hand. When creating content or experiences for children, it is critical to consider things like age, vision development and emotional development, and how those stages affect the activities that children of different ages can do. He also noted that children learn best when they are interacting physically with the world, and VR might create opportunities that standard lesson plans or technologies may not allow.

On the flip side, Homer pointed out that current VR experiences are often isolating; even when a group of students might be experiencing the same VR simulation, they wear individual headsets. Social interactions play an important role in learning, boosting cognitive and emotional skills, especially for young children. It is only now that the technology is beginning to allow people to interact with one another, which might enhance the impact of a VR experience.

Another area that warrants further research is the issue of “reality blurring.” Homer pointed out that although two-year-olds are able to understand the distinction between a story and real life, “it’s a blurry one.” This kind of emotional response is not necessarily limited to young children—he pointed out that even adults feel spooked after watching scary movies late at night. But younger children have a developing sense of self-awareness, and may perceive virtual reality experiences as “more real” than adults do; they may also confuse experiences that they have experienced in virtual reality with their actual experience, creating “false memories.”

When used wisely, VR offers unique learning opportunities:

Brooke Morrill explained that when Schell Games first meets with a client about a new project, they ask, “What platform is this for, and why? Who is the intended audience, what’s the context, what is the goal of this project, and what technology would be best to deliver the intended experience?” Many times, a client comes with an idea for a game in VR, when another platform may be better suited for the desired learning experience. She also pointed out that students are quick to sniff out learning interventions in which traditional worksheets might be thinly disguised through game mechanics, AKA “chocolate-covered broccoli.”

According to Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, there are only four compelling reasons to use VR. If you actually carried out what you were doing virtually in the physical world, it would be:

• dangerous (e.g., working with harmful materials in a lab),
• impossible (e.g., breaking the laws of physics),
• counterproductive (e.g., cutting down a forest to learn about deforestation), or
• too expensive (e.g., to take a field trip to another country).

Morrill and Homer discussed projects and subject areas in which VR might provide unique opportunities to engage deeply with content that would otherwise not be safe, possible, productive, or cost-effective in the classroom. Homer’s lab is designing a project in which students engage with interactive holograms of molecules and cells, and HoloLab Champions by Schell Games allows students to access a VR chemistry lab. Morrill pointed out that with HoloLab Champions, students learn valuable physical skills like scooping, pouring, and using a balance with chemicals that may be difficult to access or potentially hazardous in real life.

Teachers need support:

A common theme throughout the discussion was the need to provide teachers with professional development materials and training to help them deploy VR successfully with their classes. Brooke Morrill and Bruce Homer agreed that it is critical to offer technical training and support for teachers—even those who are confident with most technologies. Morrill pointed out that “most people don’t have VR at home yet, so we [Schell Games] try to ease that transition by providing some troubleshooting tips.”

Craig Watkins pointed out that in research conducted for his book The Digital Edge, he found that there is a kind of “arms race” to bring more access to technology to classrooms in order to prepare kids for a “knowledge-driven economy” when they graduate. But while the distribution of technology in the classroom is becoming more equitable, many teachers are assigned to teach technology classes despite not being sufficiently prepared to do so.

Watkins found, however, that students often find creative ways to use and share media that were personally meaningful to them. For those self-motivated and entrepreneurial students in “technology-rich but curriculum poor” classrooms, Watkins found that simply having access to equipment and an opportunity to create media offered the opportunity to create and share VR content about specific locations in their communities and engaging with others to share their own experiences.

Redefining assessment:

A successful VR experience for the classroom takes into account a teacher’s need to fulfill a curriculum requirement and to assess a student’s mastery of content or skills, all while actively engaging the learner. In terms of adoption by schools, Michael Preston pointed out that it may take a cultural shift for immersive technologies like VR and AR to be widely adopted in classrooms. Do the experiences that are available align with the curricular content that teachers need to cover, and in ways that cannot be addressed successfully by traditional methods, while allowing a teacher to evaluate learning outcomes in meaningful ways?

Preston suggested that evaluating learning outcomes in VR should reflect the learning goals of the activity, regardless of it being simulated in VR (Is it a field trip or a science experiment? Is it interactive?). Evaluation might also assess students’ understanding of the medium itself. What do learners make of the VR artifact? What was different for them compared to what they’ve experienced in the physical world?

Watkins pointed out that teachers may also want to consider less tangible effects, such as a student’s attitudes towards content before and after a lesson and reflections upon an experience. Providing students opportunities to engage deeply with content that matters to them offers a sense of agency, and that if it were possible to measure these identities pre- and post- engagement with VR interventions, we might find that students feel more empowered by opportunities to experiment with different perspectives.

We’ve got some R&D to do:

The marketplace for virtual reality in education is young: while there is enthusiasm among both students and teachers, we’re at a point where there is still not enough information about these technologies’ potential impact on the health and safety of children under 13. Whether developers are refraining from marketing to young children because of what may be a fairly arbitrary age limit influenced by COPPA, or due to safety concerns that researchers have not yet studied, both researchers and developers have an opportunity to make important contributions to this space. Developers should work with researchers and learning scientists to create immersive learning experiences that are effective and age-appropriate. Careful and strategic efforts now may pave the road for positive, engaging learning opportunities that are safe and empowering for kids.

View the full conversation here:

Speak & Spell was produced by Texas Instruments from 1978-1992.

Growing up in the 1980’s, I played with a lot of toys and technology. My first experience with a computer was an Apple IIe at school, where I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. At home, my technology-enabled toys consisted of a Speak and Spell that would repeat what I would type, and  video game consoles like the Atari 2600 and Nintendo. When I look back, I don’t recall ever thinking these were creepy experiences. The Speak and Spell spoke strangely, but I never thought of it as being alive. And because the Atari and Nintendo were not connected to the internet, there was no real possibility of online communication or safety when it came to the video games I played (although I was told to sit farther away or my eyes would be damaged).

Instead, things that were creepy to me as a kid included haunted houses, the theme song from Jaws, the strangeness of E.T., the possibility of monsters, and stranger danger. Fast-forward to the 2010s: technology is much more pervasive, and new questions have arisen about social media, surveillance, privacy, dark patterns, and artificial intelligence.

Today, I’m the director of KidsTeam UW, an intergenerational co-design team of children (ages 7 – 11) and adults that partner together to design new technologies FOR and WITH children. During my time with KidsTeam UW, my colleagues and I have noticed some trends and patterns in children and their thoughts about toys and technology that seemed different from when I was a kid. I’ve heard children saying things like, “I don’t like that technology, it’s creepy” or “I can’t be with that technology, it’s creepy.” As my team realized that children connect the words “technology” and “creepy”often, we decided it was time to examine exactly what they mean when they say that.

Photo: Kids Team UW

We asked the question: What makes children think certain technologies are creepy but view others as benign? To investigate this question, we conducted four participatory design sessions with 11 children (ages 7 -11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children.

What Do Children Fear?
We found that children’s fears about the risks of technology fell into two different categories:

Download as a PDF

• Physical Harm. Children in our study often used morbid words such as “kill,” “murder,” and “death” to convey their fears about creepy technologies. They constantly referred to physical harm when describing creepy or unknown technologies. Children described, for example, technologies that try to punish their users and technologies to stalk others and cause harm.
• Loss of Attachment. A second recurring fear was that creepy technologies would take them away from their parents or otherwise intrude on relationships with people they love. A child we interviewed stated that creepy technologies take you away from mom and dad. The children in our study had this fear of technology “taking over your life” so that they would be unable to be with their real parents.

What Makes Children Think a Technology is Creepy?
Kids told us that certain signals make technology seem creepy and arouse fears of physical harm or separation from their parents. The six signals that came up repeatedly were:

• Deception. The children in our study frequently expressed fears about technology intentionally deceiving them. For instance, one child noted: “Like I’ll say -call Jan Smith [mom, pseudonym] and it [digital voice assistant] will call that person. Okay, it will call them. Then when I ask -will you kill me in my sleep? It says -I can’t answer that.” Here, the child wanted to hear a direct NO from the voice assistant, rather than an “I don’t know.”
• Mimicry. Children expressed concerns about technology mimicking them or other people, potentially giving it the power to subsume their identity. Children in our study worried that technology could “steal your identity,” replace you, or take you away from your family.
• Control. Children expressed concerns about the ability to control the flow of information, the actions of technology, and its output. For instance, one child expressed that if they could not control Amazon Alexa, the technology would seem creepy: “Yeah, so, it’s like Alexa is in this room and she starts interrupting this conversation.”
• Unpredictability. Children explained that systems whose behavior they could not predict—such as a digital assistant that no longer responds to its wake word—led them to worry that something that seems harmless might become sinister.
• Ominous Physical Appearance. The superficial look, sound, and feel of a technology is key to how children assess if the technology is creepy. In some instances, children were willing to look past other creepy signals if a technology had a charming appearance.

Mediating between signals and fear
Children referred to their parents as the most important factor in determining whether technologies were creepy or not. One child noted that smartphones, laptops, and other consumer electronics were not creepy because their parents frequently used them without anxiety. In contrast, another child expressed that consumer electronics had the potential to be creepy because his parents put a paper cover over their laptop camera to prevent intruders.

What does this all mean for parents/guardians and designers?
Thinking back on my nostalgic stroll through the toys and technologies that I had access to in the 1980s compared to the tech-enabled gadgets that children have access to today, it is clear that technology itself has changed so much that the way children engage and play with tech-toys is different. However, rather than being fearful or trying to avoid technologies and new internet-based toys, it seems that it could be very productive for parents to talk about these topics with their children.

Having a conversation about creepiness and technology may be an important first step into questions of safety, privacy, ethics, and surveillance. These are really big topics for kids to digest. But we know from research that scaffolding conversations with children on the issue of privacy and security is important.

We know from our work that children rely on their parents’ thoughts about technology as a way of making sense of the world. Kids we spoke to talked about their parents’ technology usage and whether it was ok to trust common technologies, like smartphones and tablets, because their parents trusted them.

As a starting point for designing technologies that children trust and enabling children to decide what to trust, we came up with a set of questions that both parents/guardians and designers can think about and discuss together with kids, such as:

• What information is okay for people to know about children? Do we think technology could deceive people? Why and how?
• What do we want a technology to look like? Do technologies that look and feel nice always act nice?
• Could technology ever replace people?
• What do you think about parent/guardian usage of technology? How does technology usage in parents affect children’s views of that relationship?
• How should technology act with people?
• How much control should kids have over technology?

Children today have core fears that have the potential to be invoked by technology, but are overlooked in the design process. We believe that it is essential to understand more deeply children’s fears of technology and how they make sense of the digital world around them.

Check out our full paper here.

Yip, J., Sobel, K., Gao, X., Hishikawa, A.M., Lim, A., Meng, L., Ofiana, R.F., Park, J., & Hiniker, A. (2019). Laughing is scary, but farting is cute: A conceptual model of children’s perspectives of creepy technologies. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019).

Youth Services Librarian Claudia Haines recently hosted a family screening of the new PBS Kids show Molly of Denali at Homer Public Library in Homer, Alaska. This post from her blog is republished here with permission.

I’m always looking for media, in all formats, that authentically reflects Alaskan families’ experiences. Today, a new show produced by WGBH in Boston for PBS Kids does that and more. I’m excited about the show, and the advanced screening we offered at the library earlier this summer was a great learning experience. Here’s why:

Image: Molly of Denali (PBS Kids)

The show

Molly of Denali, like other PBS Kids shows for young children, is an entertaining animated show that supports early learning; in this case the idea of informational text. The producers define informational text as “any text created for the main purpose of providing information. Informational text can be created using written words, oral language, visuals, or a combination of these forms.” (PBS Kids) Examples include recipes, signs, maps, websites, text messages, podcasts, songs and more. Informational text is all around us and provides another entry point for supporting early literacy, but it is rarely given so much attention in early childhood entertainment.

The show also aims to address cultural representation, and it does this well. The story, ways of knowing, and setting details are authentic. Each episode also features a live action piece featuring Alaskan kids sharing about, well, Alaskan life. How does a producer in Boston get that right? She had help. From the script writers, voice actors, and song writers to the cultural advisors, Alaska Natives were involved in the production and the result is what I dreamed of when I was working on the Diverse and Inclusive Checklist with KIDMAP. (Watch out, Pamyua‘s theme song is catchy and you’ll be singing it all day long!) The show is silly, entertaining, enriching, and even serious at times.

Listen to a story about the making of Molly of Denali on Alaska Public Media here.

The Event

While Molly of Denali is set in a fictional town, Qyah, kids from all over rural Alaska can see themselves reflected in the show. But no, this isn’t just a show just for Alaskan kids. (Let’s face it, that would not be an easy sell for a producer.) Kids from elsewhere can relate too! Families will connect with the characters and learn much about what it is like to be a kid in rural Alaska. Molly Mabray is a young Athabaskan who is adventurous, strong, curious, and kind. What a great role model for all kids!

We were excited to be one of several Alaskan communities to host an advanced screening of the show. We wanted to bring families together at the library to celebrate what the show and its creators had accomplished. It was also a great media mentorship opportunity. I knew we could model how to practice Joint Media Engagement, or Co-viewing, while watching a tv show together, introduce tips on evaluating media and talk about how quality tv can support early learning.

I started the afternoon family event by quoting from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s piece “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors”, introducing many grownups to her name, words, and ideas. I have wanted to do this for a long time and Molly of Denali offered great examples of all three for families in my community. It also gave use a foundation for talking about the show during the event (in between the two episodes we watched). Dr. Bishop’s idea is not strictly a book-related concept, but applies to all media and we can use it to evaluate media in the library and at home.

I then introduced the show and some of the characters, talked about what informational text is and why it is important to talk about, and shared some of the backstory and why it is a landmark creation. The intro was not too long, just several minutes, but planted a seed that got grown-ups thinking. The questions I got after the program, about recommendations, the show’s creators, when the show would air, etc. were evidence.

We showed two episodes (animated portions only), with a short conversation and popcorn break in between. During the between-episodes chat, I asked the audience questions like “What did you recognize in that episode?” (high tunnels for growing food, mountains, trees dirt roads, traditions, rivers, the library, the kids and more), “What is different about Homer (where we live) and Molly’s community of Qyah?” (no ocean, no boats, the language, the stores) and “How did Molly and her friends learn about canoeing?” (YouTube, the coach, practice) Many kids enthusiastically chimed in with their observations.

Afterwards, I mentioned that families who enjoy podcasts might like to add Molly of Denali to their listening list. Several families asked me how to access to podcast episodes and if I could recommend others. Alaska is big and casual road trips are long. Podcasts are a perfect fit for the Alaskan family!

About 65 people showed up for the program held in our children’s library. After the screening families stayed in the library to chat with each other, do some of the activity sheets connected to the show and look for books. (I made sure a display of Alaskan picture books was prominent.) The event was simple, but meaningful.

I hope you enjoy the show!

Claudia Haines leads storytimes, hosts Maker programs, and gets great media into the hands of kids and teens as the Youth Services Librarian and Media Mentor at the Homer Public Library (Alaska). She is a co-author of the Association for Library Service to Children’s white paper, Media  Mentorship in Libraries Serving Youth (2015). She trains other librarians as media mentors and serves on both local and national committees that support families and literacy. She blogs at www.nevershushed.com. @claudiahaines