This article appeared in Physics Today, January 2021, page 26 and appears here with permission.

From Elinor Wonders Why to Emily’s Wonder Lab, a multitude of fresh, dynamic programs have recently premiered that encourage children to channel their inner scientists. Between streaming services and television, today’s young people have more access to quality science programming than ever. But before there was Cyberchase, Wild Kratts, The Magic School Bus, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, there was the show that started it all: 3-2-1 Contact.

Premiering in 1980, 3-2-1 Contact aired on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) stations across the US and quickly became a beloved classic of Gen Xers and Millennials. Although it was not the first science series for children—Watch Mr. Wizard had entertained young people in the 1950s and 1960s—it broke new ground in several ways. It was the first children’s science series to receive funds from NSF. It was the first to intentionally reflect the diversity of its young audience by introducing viewers to scientists of different ethnic backgrounds. And unlike previous science programs, which presented kids with straightforward experiments, 3-2-1 Contact’s creators gave their show a freer format that combined skits, cartoons, and documentary shorts, grouped into loose themes. For example, one episode on the topic of “order and disorder” featured a visit to a sewage treatment plant, a skit about teamwork, and a quick lesson on programming computers. The show’s writers had ample freedom to familiarize students with various scientific disciplines.

Many viewers have credited 3-2-1 Contact with helping to spark their scientific career aspirations. In an article she wrote for Science, Ainissa Ramirez, an engineer and science communicator, fondly recalled the series: “I have wanted to be a scientist ever since I was a little girl. I got the idea from a television program called 3-2-1 Contact, where I watched a young African-American girl solve problems. I saw my reflection in her and was transfixed.”¹

That effect wasn’t an accident. The creators of 3-2-1 Contact were determined to use their show to inspire a new generation of scientists. What was their secret? Science.

Strikingly, 3-2-1 Contact was the first science television series to be designed by scientific study. The show’s content and dynamic style were informed by two years of focus groups and audience evaluations. A close look into the origins of 3-2-1 Contact offers a fascinating case study into the ways that scientists, researchers, and broadcasters can collaborate on educational projects to reach and inspire viewers.

Meet the Mod Squad

The innovative 3-2-1 Contact was a product of the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW, now the Sesame Workshop), the nonprofit production company that had created Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The CTW was founded in 1968 by producer Joan Ganz Cooney and a handful of other creative professionals who hoped to develop a new type of educational programming for American children. Sesame Street, with its colorful puppets and humans living together in a New York City neighborhood, premiered in 1969, and by 1972 it was watched by 80% of all preschoolers in the US.²

But Sesame Street isn’t just one of the most popular children’s shows of all time; it was the first to be based on scientific research.

Breaking new ground, the CTW hired a full research staff.³

Every television series the organization produced had its own research team that assessed the show’s intended audience and determined the viewers’ wants and needs. Cooney later recounted how her colleagues ridiculed her belief in sociological research. “‘Researchers helping producers design a show? You must be kidding!’” she recalled being told by “practically everyone in TV willing to give an honest opinion.”⁴

The established television dogma held at the time that a successful show depended on the intuition of an experienced staff, not the facts and figures of audience surveys.

But the 1970s saw a flurry of new sociological studies about children and television. For the first time, social scientists started to observe children in classrooms, not laboratories. They began asking how television viewing affected children’s views of society. Science helped producers like Cooney prove that badly scripted shows could damage children’s worldviews, and prosocial programming could help children form more positive ideas about their environment.

The CTW’s research department became the company’s secret weapon in the battle to design wholesome educational content for young minds. Shows were designed based on an informed feedback loop between writers, researchers, and directors. As a program was produced, department staff would test it in classrooms for appeal and comprehension by using a system of interviews and questionnaires. If children disliked a particular character, for instance, the writers would be notified, and the character might be rewritten or recast. Only when the show garnered the audience’s approval would it be aired on national television.

In the early 1970s, buoyed by the success of Sesame Street and The Electric Company, Cooney tasked her researchers with a new challenge: to create a television series that would inspire children to become scientists. Over the next four years, several CTW producers brainstormed ideas for a “curiosity show” with students at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, shown in figure 1 on the left. Their ideas became the seeds of a new science series.

 

The three research associates who worked to develop the new show were Milton Chen, Hylda Clarke, and Barbara Myerson Katz. Chen and Myerson Katz had studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and Clarke held advanced degrees in psychology. Additionally, Chen focused on communications research and later pursued a doctorate at Stanford University. The three researchers worked on the third floor of the CTW office building in Manhattan, but they spent a lot of their time traveling to different elementary school classrooms, YMCAs, and community centers in the New York City area. As a diverse team (Chen is Chinese American, Clarke is African American, and Myerson Katz is Jewish), they dubbed themselves “the Mod Squad of research,” a reference to the popular television show about a multiethnic trio of police officers. They worked under the CTW’s head of research, Keith Mielke (shown in figure 1 with Myerson Katz and Chen), a former university professor who proved a generous mentor for the young researchers.

The CTW was an exciting place for young creative professionals in the 1970s. Researchers and writers would frequently be hired on a temporary basis and then become permanent staff members as positions opened up. Although each CTW show had its own research team, members of different teams often met for lunch and strolled together through Central Park. The research staff spent long nights together tabulating data and graphing assessments by hand.

In 1977 Chen, Clarke, and Myerson Katz began designing studies to assess children’s preexisting attitudes about science and how they were shaped by films and TV shows. They even had at their disposal a new interactive technology called the Program Evaluation Analysis Computer, a system of individual remotes that children could use to register their likes and dislikes and send them to a central console.⁵

The researchers could then view the data within minutes on a computer monitor—a step up from hand tabulation!

That summer, the cinema release of Star Wars captivated the CTW’s core audience. Myerson Katz remembers the first time she heard about the movie: She, Mielke, and Chen were walking down Broadway when they spotted a striking billboard advertising it. “Keith pointed to the sign,” she recalls, “and said, ‘That’s what we’re competing against. We have to get the attention of an audience that’s going to see that in the movies.’” The CTW, which lacked the budget for talking robots and fast-moving spaceships, had to convince children that real science could be just as cool as the Force.

The squad in action

One of Chen, Clarke, and Myerson Katz’s first studies gathered qualitative data on children’s bias toward scientists. Two hundred children in grades 4–6 at an elementary school in western New York were asked to write essays either describing the reasons why they might want to be a scientist or imagining the average day in the life of a scientist.

Discouragingly, boys and girls alike overwhelmingly believed that science was an intellectually exhausting, dangerous, and demanding career. Their perceptions reflected the way scientists were portrayed in movies and cartoons: as older men wearing white lab coats, hunched over their laboratory equipment. Most saw scientists as “very narrow human beings who spend their lives in labs and have little social interaction.” One boy wrote, “I would not like to be a scientist because I would not like to do what they do. They get up early in the morning.” The children understood the importance of scientific research—and some expressed an interest in learning about the human body—but they didn’t feel comfortable imagining themselves as future scientists.

The team’s magnum opus, “The Television Interest Survey,”⁶ came in 1978. More than 4000 children in five states completed the survey, which asked their opinions on a range of popular television programs, including The Six Million Dollar Man, The Muppet Show, and ZOOM. The researchers hoped that the selection of states—Massachusetts, Mississippi, Virginia, Illinois, and California—would encompass not only geographic but also ethnic and economic diversity. To make the questionnaire as accessible as possible, they designed it to be completed in just 20 minutes, with minimal literacy required. The study confirmed what the researchers had long suspected: Current television programs were not meeting the needs of scientifically minded children.

Commercial stations featured a few documentary programs about wildlife, and they were popular. Almost 90% of the survey participants were avid viewers of Wild Kingdom, a nature series on NBC. Children also reported watching the technicolor series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

But for children with budding interests in engineering, physics, chemistry, or astronomy, there weren’t a lot of television options. In 1978 PBS had been around for less than a decade, and its producers had largely focused on arts and culture programs. NOVA, the only nationally aired PBS program that featured scientists at all, was billed as a show “for curious grown-ups.” Understandably, then, only 30% of the children surveyed reported having even heard of it.

Unfortunately, the content gap in astronomy and other physical sciences was partially filled by the pseudoscientific show In Search Of. Hosted by former Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy, In Search Of covered tantalizing subjects such as UFOs, psychic plants, and Bigfoot. The show was quite popular: Two thirds of boys and around half of girls surveyed reported watching it. But the show’s entertaining approach conflated fact and fiction, much to the dismay of science educators and researchers.

Overall, girls and boys reported watching different genres of programs. Many more boys than girls watched science and science fiction shows. Girls, on the other hand, enjoyed scripted shows that centered on female characters and the importance of community, such as Little House on the Prairie and—surprisingly—Charlie’s Angels, a show aimed at teenage boys. But girls told the researchers that they loved how the Angels solved puzzles and showed confidence. Young girls, it seemed, were looking for role models on television. For a science show to attract girls, it would need to feature strong female cast members solving challenges. Furthermore, noting that Latino and Black viewers reported enjoying shows featuring same-ethnic-group actors, the researchers suggested the potential appeal of an ethnically diverse cast.

Additional, separate studies conducted by the team confirmed that both boys and girls seemed to like shows with dramatic narratives. Children were also intrigued by action-filled footage, such as oil spills and exploding volcanoes. Documentaries with strong visuals and clear narration could hold their attention.

But the characters and action needed to be realistic. Surprisingly, a television short featuring science fiction hadn’t fared well in CTW’s classroom tests. “While Star Wars was extremely popular,” the researchers noted, “the phony appearance of a space station and its cast in another program was rejected by kids.” Children were a fickle audience; they were eager for new material but picky about production quality. As the researchers summarized, “This audience is quite sophisticated in their television viewing and relatively unsophisticated in their scientific knowledge, which is what makes them a fascinating and challenging audience for this series.”

Researchers in the writers’ room

As the writers collected and developed ideas for the new show, Chen, Clarke, and Myerson Katz continued to have seats at the table. They were joined by several more scientific advisers; early in the process, Cooney had recruited a wide variety of well-regarded science educators and professors to join 3-2-1 Contact’s advisory committee. Charles Walcott, a biologist from the State University of New York at Stony Brook who had been involved with the first season of NOVA, served as the scientific content director of the series. MIT physicist Philip Morrison and his wife Phylis Morrison, a science educator, urged the writers to focus on how science was a part of a child’s daily experience beyond the classroom. Sheldon White, a psychologist at Harvard, suggested that the show could give children the conceptual tools to recognize patterns in their own lives. He proposed organizing episodes around simple binaries, such as “hot and cold” and “big and little,” rather than conventional scientific disciplines. That thematic structure became the foundation to 3-2-1 Contact’s novel approach.

The next conceptual building block was Chen’s idea. He proposed dividing the show between two settings: A TV studio home base and a roving remote unit that would provide daily documentary pieces. Segments in both settings would be presented by actors between 20 and 30 years old, whom Chen imagined would be like the docents in a science museum: “Their main purpose is to make everything on the show as clear as possible to viewers…. They are not professional scientists but are intensely curious and serve as role models. For now, imagine them as Lindsay Wagner [The Bionic Woman], Clifton Davis [That’s My Mama], or Ron McNair [one of NASA’s first Black astronauts].”⁷

Young viewers wanted to see youthful, hip students, the team concluded, not space warriors or cutesy Muppets. The show’s realism would set it apart from other children’s television programs.

Gradually, the structure of 3-2-1 Contact took shape. The show’s three main characters—Marc, a Black man; Lisa, a white woman; and Trini, a Latina woman, shown in figure 2—would take turns traveling to locations such as laboratories, volcanoes, and the ocean. In between those documentary shorts, they’d hang out in their clubhouse to discuss what they’d learned. The clubhouse setting was the show’s connective tissue and provided viewers with a relatable, on-screen community.

 

With that premise in place, some of the show’s consultants and writers wondered about other ways to make the series “cool.” With the popularity of Mork & Mindy and its zany star in mind, they thought about finding a host with similar appeal. Perhaps a teen idol such as Shaun Cassidy? Or Alan Alda, the star of M*A*S*H? For a while, they joked about approaching Henry Winkler, “the Fonz” from Happy Days.

But research had shown that children wanted multifaceted scientific role models, not talking heads. So instead of hiring one main celebrity, the producers decided to sprinkle cameo appearances throughout the show. Tennis pro Arthur Ashe appeared in one segment to talk with Marc about the mechanics of his sport. Dizzy Gillespie, shown in figure 3, and the members of KISS were featured in episodes about sounds. Most of the first season’s guests, however, were plucked from scientific and everyday life: graduate students, university professors, a surfer, a race-car driver, a veterinarian, and the Guinness Book of World Records record holder for making the world’s largest pizza.

 

With its eclectic mix of guests, 3-2-1 Contact projected the idea that anyone could be a scientist. The show never lost sight of its commitment to racial and ethnic diversity. In one episode, Marc was building a model of the solar system and wanted to learn more about the Sun. So he invited Joseph Martinez, a Mexican American physicist from the Department of Energy, to visit the clubhouse and talk about the physics of light. Martinez and the gang sat down on beanbag chairs, and the conversation soon turned from science to his career path. After listening to Martinez recount how he’d gotten his start in science, Trini asked him why there were so few Hispanic scientists. Martinez explained that Mexican American children didn’t have many role models in the sciences and didn’t know that they could be scientists. Further, he explained, some teachers falsely believed that their Spanish-speaking students couldn’t excel in science. The hosts expressed their disappointment. “It shouldn’t really make any difference,” replied Lisa, “because science is science, and the Moon affects everyone on Earth, no matter what language you speak.”

Contacting a new generation of viewers

In late 1979, after three years of production led by executive producer Kathy Mendoza, 3-2-1 Contact was approaching its final form. All the CTW staff were pleased with the first season of episodes, written by physicist Ted Ducas and science writer Boyce Rensberger. At the last minute, Sid Fleischman, the Newbery Medal–winning author of The Whipping Boy, was hired to write a detective serial to be aired as a “show within a show” on the series. The result, The Bloodhound Gang, featured a trio of crime-solving kids foiling the plots of a revolving cast of zany villains. The stars of the segment, shown in figure 4, were as diverse as those of the main series.

 

When 3-2-1 Contact premiered on 14 January 1980, one reviewer called it “zippy, hip, and the kind of show that would interest adults as well as 8- to 12-year-olds.” During its premiere run, Nielsen estimated that the show had been viewed by 23% of all children between the ages of 6 and 11. The research team’s follow-up studies indicated that many children who’d watched the program felt more positively about science—and were more likely to agree that women could be scientists and that scientists were normal people. Some of the show’s young viewers, such as Ainissa Ramirez, would go on to pursue science as a career. Just as the CTW researchers had hoped, African American and Hispanic children saw themselves reflected in the characters of 3-2-1 Contact.

Chen was promoted to the CTW’s director of research and oversaw the studies that guided 3-2-1 Contact’s subsequent seasons. For the first season, the 3-2-1 Contact research team had designed more than 50 studies and surveyed 10 000 children. For the second season, which aired in 1983, Chen led his team in generating 60 additional reports. That season was even more successful, reaching almost 40% of school-age children. To accompany the series, the CTW published a popular companion magazine, featuring games, activities, and articles about science, that saw a yearly circulation of 300 000 copies. The Girl Scouts partnered with the CTW to produce a series of 3-2-1 Contact merit badges that rewarded girls for watching the program and completing activities inspired by particular episodes. In the Washington, DC, area alone, almost 10 000 of the badges were awarded.

New seasons of 3-2-1 Contact continued until 1988, with several changes in actors and format along the way. The show’s success encouraged the NSF program officers to fund more children’s television series, including Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993) and The Magic School Bus (1994). Samuel Gibbon Jr, one of the leading visionaries of 3-2-1 Contact, was inspired to create a narrative-driven science series, The Voyage of the Mimi (1984), which followed the adventures of children on a marine biology expedition. (That series, incidentally, marked Ben Affleck’s television debut.) In the mold of 3-2-1 Contact, the CTW-produced Square One Television (1987) featured an eclectic assortment of sketches about mathematics. George Tressel, the former head of NSF’s Public Understanding of Science program, credited 3-2-1 Contact with laying the foundation for many of the organization’s informal science education initiatives in the 1980s. (See the article by George Tressel, Physics Today, November 1990, page 24.)

The success of 3-2-1 Contact proved the value of formative research studies in television production. No previous television program had thoughtfully asked its audience, “What sort of science would you like to watch on TV?” The CTW embraced the unusual perspective that collecting audience data would help to create a better series. Today, creators of many children’s science shows conduct similar research to evaluate their programming. Producers like Cooney showed their colleagues that scientists could be trusted members of production teams.

But 3-2-1 Contact also demonstrated something much more important. It was the first science television series to take diversity seriously. Recognizing the need for children to see diversity reflected in scientific and technological fields, the 3-2-1 Contact researchers, writers, and actors intentionally created inclusive narratives of science. The CTW listened to the voices of underrepresented children and invited them to dream about their own future in science. The ultimate message was that science is for everyone—especially viewers like you.

 

 

Thanks to Milton Chen, Ted Ducas, Barbara Myerson Katz, Sam Gibbon, and Charlie Walcott for sharing their memories with me. Also, special thanks to the Library of American Broadcasting and to David Cohen at Sesame Workshop for allowing me to access their collections.

 

 

References

1. A. Ramirez, Science 348, 726 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.348.6235.726 
2. F. Bruning, Newsday, 23 October 1972, p. 1A.
3. For more about the early history of the CTW, see R. W. Murrow, Sesame Street and the Reform of Children’s Television, Johns Hopkins U. Press (2006).
4. S. M. Fisch, R. T. Truglio, eds., “G” Is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and “Sesame Street,” Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2001), p. xi.
5. M. Chen, A Review of Research on the Educational Potential of 3-2-1 Contact: A Children’s TV Series on Science and Technology, rep. prepared for the Children’s Television Workshop and the National Science Foundation (January 1984), available at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED265849.pdf
6. K. Mielke, M. Chen, in Learning from Television: Psychological and Educational Research, M. Howe, ed., Academic Press (1983), p. 31.
7. M. Chen to Science Show Production and Research, “Strategy and Guesses Leading to Format Idea Stressing Viewer Participation Strategy and Guesses” (8 September 1978), folder 34, box 103, Children’s Television Workshop Records, Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland.

© 2021 American Institute of Physics.

 

 

Ingrid Ockert serves as an adviser to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. She is a historian of science based in Berkeley, California.

 

 

The importance of literacy skills in our lives is clear – reading and language skills allow us to read signs, menus, and participate in everyday encounters. As adults, we rely on our literacy skills in the workplace to write reports, emails, or lesson plans. But it is also clear that critical “literacy” skills extend into the world of technology. And while digital literacy is increasingly becoming a component of the K-12 curriculum, we still lack sufficient understanding of how those efforts may help our students navigate their increasingly digital world.

Part of digital literacy is the ability to complete simple tasks like searching for a video or game; but in fact, digital literacy also includes knowing how to evaluate the information found and use it to create one’s own media content. While most children know how to log on to an iPad, play a game on their parents’ phones, search for something they’re curious about, or find a video on YouTube, they may not know how to recognize credible content in websites and videos and then use that understanding to use or share online information and sources appropriately. With this in mind, curriculum developers and teachers alike have been weaving digital literacy skill development into curriculum and lesson plans.

Dream Research for an Elementary Education Student

In Fall 2019, I joined a research team at High Point University (HPU) to further understand the digital literacy skills of children through a project funded by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Our team designed a study to explore digital literacy among kids and parents in North Carolina, focusing our research on 8- to 12-year-olds’ interpretations of and learning from  “unboxing” videos on YouTube. We chose unboxing-style videos due to their popularity among this age group and their under-the-radar advertising content.

Each child in our study was randomly assigned to view one of three 3-minute unboxing videos that we created for the project. In each video, a child reviewed a WaterPik Water Flosser for kids, a device that sprays a steady stream of water to remove food particles between teeth. The three videos vary in how the child unboxer explains his motive for creating the video. In the “overtly commercial” video, the child explains that he just received the product from his partners at Waterpik, and gives several other clues that his video is sponsored. In the “school project” video, he states that he is making the video for his class as part of an assignment on healthy teeth. The “subtly commercial” video featured the same child reviewing the water flosser in a similar manner, but he does not provide a clearly stated purpose to his video (though, it seems that he creates YouTube videos as a hobby).

Our team also created a short video that a random half of the participants saw before the unboxing video. This pre-roll training video explains how to recognize advertising in YouTube content (such as watching for words like “sponsorship” or “partner”). The children in our study watched their assigned videos and then answered questions related to the content and commercial bias of the unboxing video they saw. Parents also answered survey questions about their family’s home media practices.

Early Findings

Like most things over the past year, our study progress was slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although our team continues to collect data, 107 families have completed the study to date. The figures below display some of our most notable findings. Specifically, children who saw the pre-roll training video were more confident that the video made for a school report was not trying to get them to buy the product. Conversely, they were more able to recognize that the video which was “subtly commercial,” or vague about its purpose, likely did have a selling intent. However, children seemed more savvy about the selling intention of the overtly commercial video (which mentioned the manufacturer as a “sponsor” and “partner”), if they did NOT first watch the training video.

 

 

These trends are both promising and a bit concerning. It is promising to see that many of the children were able to identify advertising in the overtly commercial video, as this is a vital digital literacy skill in a world where people are constantly trying to sell products to the vulnerable and savvy alike. Yet, it is also worrisome that they do not detect subtler information suggesting commercial intent, and that some efforts to increase their evaluation skills may confuse them even more. Moreover, these findings make me wonder how many other critical digital literacy skills school-age children do not have. Research like ours can help guide efforts in both the home and classroom for teaching children digital literacy skills such as recognizing the selling intent of online unboxing videos and evaluating information with the communicator’s goals and biases in mind.

Even though COVID-19 dampened the timeline of our study, data collection is still underway and will undoubtedly yield more noteworthy results. I am forever grateful for the opportunity to work on this research. My time spent studying children’s digital literacy skills is time that I will never forget or take for granted. I am so thankful for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center for allowing me to pursue research on a topic that is relevant to my future and giving me the chance to learn and grow as a student, researcher, and future elementary school teacher.

 

 

Allison Patrick graduated from High Point University in 2021 as an Elementary Education Major and Mathematics Minor. Currently, she is completing a Masters degree in Education with a concentration in STEM. Allison plans to complete her training in education with a year abroad, and then return to her hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to teach at the elementary level.

The following is an excerpt from Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to School and Emotional Learning by Matthew Farber and appears here courtesy of publisher Peter Lang.

 

In the early 1980s, video gaming often meant arcades, quick experiences designed to eat kids’ quarters. These games provided quick thrills, little in the way of nuanced emotion. Similarly, film was also fairly basic when introduced at the turn of the 20th century. Famously (at least according to legend), in 1895, the French silent film L’arrivée D’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) frightened audiences who thought that the train flickering on the screen was real. What’s worse, it appeared to be headed through the screen, about to run over viewers!

Modern cinema is more nuanced in ways that emotion is evoked. A horror movie may employ techniques afforded by the medium of film such as close-ups and jump scares. Tension and suspense may build through a combination of elements such as the narrative, musical score, and quick edits.

We tend to think of video games as being pure hedonic diversions, designed to evoke thrills and excitement. Parents may envision kids in Fortnite battle royale matches or themselves crushing candies on their smartphone screens. But like film, the medium of games has matured. Beyond Pac-Man, there are games about living with dementia, dropping out of college, dealing with grief, and coping with loss.

Let’s look at the death positivity game A Mortician’s Tale. Grim in tone, mood, and theme, as the title implies, players role-play as a young mortician named Charlie. Players-as-Charlie embalm and cremate the deceased while interacting with grieving families (graphics are cartoonish). The gameplay is slow and deliberate, with time afforded for contemplation and reflection.

Why would someone play a game like A Mortician’s Tale? Why did people watch Six Feet Under for five seasons, a drama set at a family-owned funeral parlor? Another game with a death positivity theme is Spiritfarer, where players role-play as a ferrymaster to the deceased. Although I do play some games as escapist diversions, I also appreciate games with more profound themes. On my iPhone, I may switch between playing Crossy Road, a modern take on the arcade classic Frogger, and Assemble with Care, a more somber experience. In Assemble with Care, players fix objects for characters in the game, from old cameras to wind-up watches to tape recorders. Taking things apart and putting them back together becomes a metaphor for repairing the relationships between the game’s characters.

Video games are different from the other forms of media that we consume because they are interactive. I am the one inserting embalming fluid; I am the person repairing and restoring people’s lives. Good video games also engender feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness— three components of self-determination theory (SDT) that may be absent from people’s everyday lives (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2018). At school, students are often assigned work, some of which can be boring, difficult, or frustrating. When playing games, children feel a sense of agency—they are in control, they drive the experience.

Using SDT as a framework, [Rachel] Kowert described how stay-at-home lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic made her feel less competent. “I can’t be a worker and a mom and a wife under stress,” she said. “I also have less autonomy—I can’t go where I want to go. And I feel less relatedness because we are socially and physically distanced. Games at this time help us achieve those three things from the safety of our homes, six feet away from everyone.”

Games have a great way of meeting our needs when they are not being met elsewhere. After remote learning, my 10- year- old son often watched SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons on television, a purely hedonic experience. He also played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch as a mood repair strategy. In the Mario Kart go-kart series of racing games, Question Blocks (cubes adorned with question marks) appear on the track. Driving through one triggers a rotation animation, like a slot machine. But these are not randomized; prizes, which are power-ups, are not awarded by chance or happenstance. Instead, they level the playing field. Question Blocks for racers in tenth place are stars and bullets, which propel players faster. Players ahead in the pack receive items that are less valuable, like coins or bananas. The game’s system is coded to give players persistent feelings of competence.

Games have the potential to impact our well-being in a variety of positive ways, whether it’s social modeling or mood management. “Play releases stress, and games have SDT elements that are designed to be engaging, which makes them good for our well-being,” Kowert concluded.

 

 

For more about the potential benefits of games for social and emotional learning, including examples and resources, check out Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning, published by Peter Lang.

 

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54– 67. doi:10.1006/ ceps.1999.1020.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Self- determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.

 

 

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an assistant professor of technology, innovation, and pedagogy at the University of Northern Colorado, where he founded the Gaming SEL Lab. He has been invited to the White House, authored several books and papers, and frequently collaborates with UNESCO MGIEP and Games for Change. His latest book is Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning.

When schools across the U.S. shut their doors in March 2020, families were confronted with the reality that our educational systems were not designed for remote instruction. Lack of access to the internet or devices, variation in teacher preparation, working parents, and uncertainty of how to best engage learners presented a range of obstacles. Adapting to the demands of learning from home required significant flexibility and resilience on the part of families, and the ways in which they were able to adapt offer us an opportunity to learn how we can better support students, families, and schools during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our team learned directly from 109 diverse families with K-5 children around the U.S. during the initial months of adapting to distance learning. Caregivers, including parents and a few grandparents and adult siblings, provided daily diary entries via dscout, a remote research platform. These entries allowed us to not only see how learning looked at home for a range of unique families, but also to gain insights from caregivers about the challenges they faced in this transition period and their unique strategies for addressing them. For more on our methods, please see Learning Together: Researchers and Families as Partners During COVID-19.

When asked about challenges they were facing, caregivers described a diverse range of issues associated with their new roles as co-facilitators of learning.

 

• 64% described how stepping into roles usually played by teachers was tough. Many found it difficult to find the time to help their child with their schoolwork during the day due to other demands on their time such as work and family care. When they did find time, many were unsure about their ability to teach related to both content knowledge and pedagogy. Sentiments like “I’m not a teacher” were voiced frequently, and were especially common when it came to helping with early reading and Common Core math.
• 59% expressed concerns about their child’s school learning and engagement. Caregivers frequently described how difficult it was for their children to focus on their school activities and stay motivated to complete assignments. Various distractions around the house, such as toys, snacks, siblings, and trouble with technology interfered with completing school assignments from home as well as the missing routines that kept their children focused in school. Some caregivers had questions about how much their child was learning and worried about their child falling behind, not so much because there was any direct evidence but more related to their new responsibilities in relation to their child’s academic learning.
• 51% worried about their children’s social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Over half of caregivers shared how much their children missed their friends, classmates, and teachers and some were concerned about the development of social skills during this period of relative isolation. Several shared concerns about their child’s anxiety or frustration, often related to schoolwork, and their physical wellbeing, including too much screen time and lack of physical activity.

Importantly, we found that not all families had equal access to technology-supported learning resources. Families living on less income reported lower rates of synchronous connections to class lessons, access to teacher-created videos, and individualized communication with the teacher. They also had fewer technological tools at home.

Nevertheless, through deeper descriptions of the daily learning moments happening at home and reflections about their family’s experiences with remote learning as the 2019-20 school year came to a close, it was clear that for most families these challenges provided opportunity for creative adaptation. Families were not only together in their struggles but also in their willingness to adapt and innovate to address learning and social-emotional challenges. Parents were able to complement what schools offered and often tapped into child interest areas and personalized learning for their kids in a way that teachers could not during remote learning.

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  A mom used Play-doh to review fractions with her first grader. Illustration: Stanford GSE

  Building on teachers’ successful strategies. To overcome lack of child engagement and time crunches on teaching, we saw parents like Cara listen in on online teaching moments and use that knowledge to integrate learning into play. After seeing an effective lesson, Cara extended her first grader’s Play-Doh playtime to help her review fractions, “[my daughter] said it was so mind-blowing, and I think that she didn’t only learn just math, she was also learning creatively because she was applying her artistic skills”.

• Leveraging household resources and activities. Parents often used their own knowledge, interests, and household resources (including family members) to make academic concepts meaningful and understandable. When her daughters were struggling to understand measurements in online math classes, Arielle baked a cake with them and had them handle measuring the ingredients. Jadon included his son in his own health journey during quarantine by teaching him about nutrition. Other families taught their kids how to do yard work or included them in gardening as a way to get exercise and learn new skills. These activities often also provided physical, social, and emotional supports as siblings and parents worked together.
• Connecting to outside and hands-on STEM. Multiple families found ways to extend classroom science curricula through at-home activities. Some were extensions of school assignments while others were totally homegrown. Jade taught her grandson about plants by involving him in her backyard garden. Polly and Hao bought their children science kits to work with at home after seeing their interest in online science class. Jake helped his son build a realistic aqueduct in their backyard after reading about those in ancient Rome. Lucy described a “puddle walk” on a rainy day that she used as an opportunity to teach her first and second graders about the water cycle.
• Brokering new opportunities for learning and socializing. While many caregivers worry that digital interaction can’t replace the in-person socializing their kids would have done in school, many worked to create the best social opportunities possible. For example, setting up Minecraft missions for kids to complete with their friends, creating a collage of photos of memories with friends before the pandemic, or arranging for a young reader to lead storytime for their younger cousins over Facetime. They also searched online for potential learning activities and resources for their children, such as digital books and personalized learning platforms that would align with their interests and support engagement.
• Making sense of the moment through reading together. Reading and listening to stories was an engaging activity for many of the children and some caregivers took the opportunity to connect literacy-rich activities to deeper issues. Lucy used nightly reading time to share the Little House in the Prairie historical fiction series with her two daughters, offering an opportunity for developing a shared emotional perspective about going through quarantine together, making connections to the need to handle isolation and work with resources at hand. These read-aloud sessions also led to online explorations of the geography described in the books, YouTube videos of oxen plowing fields, and inspired baking bread and making butter at home. Esther joined in on an optional school social studies assignment that allowed her and her 5th-grade daughter to read online about the histories of the towns they were each born in, giving Esther an opportunity to teach about her “roots” and her daughter a chance to ask her questions about specific places described or pictured. On other occasions, they discussed Bible passages to put the pandemic in a personally relevant historical and spiritual context.

These everyday adaptations not only supported children’s engagement in learning, but led to some benefits. Almost all caregivers reported that their children were able to keep up academically and many said they went beyond what was expected. The majority of caregivers reported new insights about what and how their children were learning. More than a third reported feeling closer to their child’s teacher.

As we prepare for a future that includes new forms of remote and hybrid learning, it is essential to recognize the implicit collaboration between teachers and caregivers in supporting learning and the need for new ways to better support that teamwork moving forward. We need to ensure that these types of relational supports are happening for all families and that teacher and caregivers have access to the devices, digital content, and broadband access that will support sustained learning. These are minimum requirements. There is also significant opportunity for innovation—we need novel forms of parent-teacher collaboration organized to share insights about learning, supports for teachers to recognize families as equal learning partners, assessments that are useful for families, and better practices for supporting learners’ interest, curiosity, joy and engagement in meaningful learning over the long term.

 

All authors have contributed equally to this writing.

Brigid Barron is a Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Her research investigates the dynamics of learning ecologies with a focus on how digital technologies can serve as catalysts for collaborative learning within and across home, school, and community settings.

Susie Garcia is an undergraduate at Stanford University pursuing a major in Economics with a concentration in Development and a minor in Philosophy.

Caitlin K. Martin is a senior researcher with Barron’s lab at Stanford University and is an independent research and evaluation consultant focusing on out-of-school learning and data visualization. 

Rose K. Pozos is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design program, where she studies everyday family learning.