The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is excited to welcome 10 youth fellows from around the country to participate in our initiative, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. These teens were selected from an applicant pool of more than 60 talented youth to join a four-month, paid fellowship program to help shape the future of public media.

In the 1990s, the disability rights movement brought us the mantra, “Nothing about us, without us.” We believe the same needs to be true here: as public media works to better engage tween and teen audiences in the future, we need to do that work in close collaboration with youth. The Cooney Center is thrilled to work with our Next Gen Public Media fellows and to live up to the commitment of  the “by” and “with” that are in our initiative’s name.

Throughout the Youth Fellows program, teens meet every other week to build community and prepare for opportunities to participate in public events for the Next Gen Public Media initiative. So far workshop participants have engaged with direct quotes shared by these youth, and in June, three of our fellows joined the peer learning community for a discussion about the question, “What’s so special about youth media, anyway?”

In the weeks and months ahead, fellows will co-lead a public webinar series, serve as advisors in our research, and influence our strategy moving forward.

Meet the fellows:

	Audrey is a junior in high school from Virginia with a passion for the humanities. She plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree following her graduation. In her free time, Audrey enjoys baking, ceramics, and experimenting with makeup.
	Faiza is a junior in Maryland, where she is enrolled in her school’s interactive media production program. She loves everything multimedia and journalism-related. Involved with an array of affinity and activism organizations at her school, she is dedicated to amplifying student voice. As a co-host for PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs’ On Our Minds podcast, she has discovered a newfound passion in public media through reporting and teen mental health.
	Gabby is a young latinx multimedia creator and artist based in Philadelphia. They like making documentary films and facilitating conversations about identity in the Latinx community. They are currently a junior in high school and spend their free time participating in numerous clubs and volunteering. Ask Gabby about anything related to True Crime or Dungeons & Dragons, and they’ll talk to you for hours…
	Gracie is going into her junior year in high school in Wisconsin. Some of her interests include musical theater, philosophy, history, video editing, and writing. When she’s not doing any of that, you can find her petting her cats or reading some meaningless, insufferably long book. When she gets older, Gracie wants to work in politics and Theater, something combining the two.
	Jaden is from Massachusetts. He enjoys diving deep into topics that involve diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). He currently is involved in his school’s DEIJ office, and he consistently helps students discover the beauty of their identity and all of the joy that comes from it. He also has a special knack for connecting with people of all different backgrounds.
	Jeremiah is from Georgia; he is the director and producer of an award-winning video for a COVID-19 PSA Competition for the Southeastern Region of Jack and Jill of America, Inc. His outstanding work as a 2021 PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs Program fellow can be found on YouTube. He also serves on the Media Team at his church, The Faith Center of Atlanta, and served as a student leader for the Good News Club at Cornerstone Bible Church. As the owner of Jpebble Graphics and Entertainment, Jeremiah continues to produce stellar marketing materials ranging from business cards to highlight reels for local athletes and musicians.
	Mahi is a sophomore from California, where she plays for the varsity basketball team. She is the founder and host of the She Can Ball podcast, a show meant to inspire the next generation of female basketball players. Mahi also serves on her local NPR-Affiliate Radio Station’s Youth Advisory Board, where she was recently the youngest ever co-host for their award-winning radio show, Forum. In her free time, she loves hanging out with her friends and family.
	Rebecca is from Virginia. She is on her school’s dance team and is a teen leader in her B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO) Chapter. She enjoys traveling, playing board games, going to the beach and hanging out with her friends. She is excited about the possibility of making a lasting impact on public media.
	Remy is a 17-year-old incoming freshman in Tennessee. He has a passion for journalism, puppetry, and having a good time! His sights are set on getting a doctorate in the future, and he hopes for a career that’s primarily focused on academic writing.
	Taylor is a senior in Florida. He’s interested in social media, technology, and linguistics. Outside of school, you can find him watching Survivor, reading, or working at a local ice cream shop. He will begin studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall.

What would the internet look like if young people designed it with their needs, interests, and rights in mind? What would be different about our information ecologies, what media and news organizations look like, and how tech platforms operate? Based on the principle that all children need to be heard and taken seriously, media groups, tech companies, researchers, and advocates must think together with young people, about how to prioritize youths’ best interests by enabling their participation in conversations about the future of media, technology, and the internet. What would a “Youth Media Bill of Rights” look like?

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is organizing a workshop at the Connected Learning Summit on Thursday, July 28 at 1:30 pm PT/4:30 pm ET. Together, participants will imagine new visions for the media life of young people through a mix of design thinking activities and group conversations to surface new principles.

We’re looking to recruit a diverse group of young people to join us — in the best case, we’ll have an even balance of youth and adult participants in the room (or perhaps even more youth than adults!). If you know a young person between the ages of 12-20 who would like to dig into these topics with us, please have them fill out this form. We will be hosting a pre-meeting on Thursday, July 21 at 1:30 pm PT/4:30 pm ET to help orient our youth participants to the session and our goals.

On May 13, 2022, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the LEGO Group hosted an interactive workshop to launch the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative in Washington, DC. Speakers included Carolina Giuga (LEGO), Bruce Homer (CUNY), Steven Vosloo (UNICEF), and Michael Preston (Joan Ganz Cooney Center).

You can hear the tension, guilt, and fear in people’s voices when they talk about what to do about protecting children in the digital environment. As with everything, the pandemic accelerated the sense that we were throwing our children into a digital ocean without a harbor, as Andrew Coy of the Digital Harbor Foundation describes it. That we were failing, as parents, as lawmakers, as companies, as society, to keep them safe.

This leads to a very important question, which I recently saw posted on the classroom wall of my 2-year-old niece’s pre-school: I wonder if there’s another way?

When we recently brought together a group of stakeholders to celebrate the launch of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project we knew that we had to do things a bit differently. We needed to get everyone wondering if there was another way. We had to remind them that there can be joy, laughter, creativity and fun for children online, if only we build it with them in mind.

So, what is RITEC?

The RITEC project was dreamed up by the LEGO Group and UNICEF and seeks to answer the question: what does a digital environment that promotes children’s well-being look like and how can we protect and promote it?

The 3-year international and cross-sectoral research project funded by the LEGO Foundation is being delivered in partnership with:

• The Joan Ganz Cooney Center
• The Young & Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University
• The CREATE Lab at New York University
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The University of Sheffield and
• The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

It includes 4 phases:

Phase 1: defining well-being for children online including creating a well-being framework developed through workshops with over 300 children from 13 countries along with analysis of existing survey data from 34,000 children aged 9-17 across 30 countries (recently completed and led by UNICEF and Western Sydney University)

The RITEC Framework features 8 components of well-being

Phase 2: play-testing the well-being framework with children (starting now and led by led by New York University, University of Sheffield and Queensland University of Technology)

Phase 3: integrating the results of the framework into commercial settings (led by the LEGO Group)

Phase 4: an international advocacy effort to promote the adoption of well-being as a priority for all child-facing businesses in their digital product and service design (Led by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center)

When the RITEC launch participants were warmed up after their LEGO building challenge, we asked them why promoting children’s well-being online is so important:

LISA GUERNSEY, EDUCATION POLICY PROGRAM, NEW AMERICA 
Every single child deserves a safe place to explore and to create and to get curious about the world.”

MICHAEL RICH, BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL 
We have to recognize that children are growing up in a world that is seamless between the physical and the digital. Therefore, we need to make the digital space a space in which we can parent and teach effectively and in which we are able to be with the children as they grow up moving seamlessly between these two environments.

IRENE LEE, COMMON SENSE MEDIA:
It’s really important that kids, are being protected online, that when they’re entering an online space, that that space is supportive of them and is looking for is looking out for their wellbeing and their safety.

We also asked them how the RITEC project will be able to contribute to helping to find “another way”?

ANDREW COY, DIGITAL HARBOR FOUNDATION
What is our digital harbor? What is our space that we are operating in where we have access to everything that’s positive and beneficial, but we aren’t exposed to all of the elements all the time. And I think what RITEC can create is a framework around how that harbor should be set up. And it’s the entry point. It’s the place you come back to in this digital landscape that we live in.

AMANDA LENHART, DATA AND SOCEITY INSTITUTE
I’m really looking forward to seeing what the RITEC project can do to help designers and people inside these technology companies. Help them with more ideas on how they might build for wellbeing, because right now I think these are really challenging problems and a lot of people don’t quite know what to do. And I’m hopeful that this research will give us a roadmap and a path forward.

MICHELLE LEE, MD PLAYLAB 
The RITEC project will hopefully be a great way to think about what responsible design actually means and provide the framework and design principles that practitioners can look to in order to make our work come from a very thoughtful place where we are putting that responsibility on us as designers who are going to create new products for the world. 

Those interested in supporting the RITEC project can:

• Tell us what tools and support you need to integrate well-being into design or policy incentives
• Test the well-being framework and/or encourage others to do the same
• Connect us with others whom we should be talking to
• Follow RITEC’S progress and join future convenings. Please sign up for the Cooney Center’s newsletter, and follow Cooney Center and LEGO Policy on Twitter for updates!

This is only the beginning, so stay tuned for much more! In the meantime, please reach out if you have any questions or ideas.

On April 26, 2022, the Cooney Center presented the first in a series of virtual workshops and associated research briefs devoted to promoting tween and teen collaboration with public media. These capacity-building events are an exciting part of our work on the By/ With/ For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Designed for producers, directors, and others interested in supporting greater youth participation in public media, the workshops are focused on highlighting research-backed best practices for engaging youth as meaningful contributors and partners. Each virtual workshop seeks to complement the deep work happening with our Peer Learning Community and Accelerator cohort, drawing from research and youth engagement work happening outside of the public media ecosystem.

At the first workshop, which focused on Models of Youth-Adult Collaboration for Public Media, we welcomed scholar Ben Kirshner from the University of Colorado, Ben spoke about his work with CU Engage, a center at the University of Colorado that works with community groups to address complex public challenges through academic courses, research projects, and creative work. Ben shared practical lessons learned from his work developing equity-oriented partnerships with youth organizations, and how he has applied those insights to build features of reciprocity into youth-adult partnership projects. CU Engage describes their unique approach  to reciprocity as follows:

“We seek to build relationships with community partners that are mutually beneficial and collaborative (“doing with”), rather than exploitative (“doing to”) or paternalistic (“doing for”). Reciprocal relationships like this begin when both partners can articulate their self-interests and, over time, work together towards common goals. This working together acknowledges and respects different forms of culture, knowledge, expertise, and capacity.” 

Among the many important takeaways from Ben’s presentation was an invitation for participants to center five guiding questions when designing youth-focused work (see below).

Credit: Ben Kirshner

Following Ben’s presentation, we heard from a panel featuring Molly Josephs, founder of the This Teenage Life podcast (which spotlights the ideas, stories, and unique perspectives of teenagers). Molly was joined by several of her talented youth crew members (Cami, Alexis and Jayden) who took time out of their school day to speak with us. The youth panelists shared reflections about what motivated them to get involved with the podcast, what they have learned through their experiences, and what aspects of the program structure help to create an authentically collaborative environment where teens feel respected and supported.

Participants then took part in working sessions with break-out groups to reflect and consider how to apply various insights from the workshop speakers to their organizational contexts. Of particular note was an activity that invited station staff and other attendees to consider how they could make various features of reciprocity in their youth-adult collaborations “come alive.” Among the key reflections offered by the groups were the following:

On How to Inspire Collaboration

• Communicating in an informal way
• Working with youth to create agendas for meetings
• Surveying and working with youth to get their feedback regarding what works best / worst for them

On How to Promote Mutual Respect

• Creating activities that allow youth and adults to connect
• Welcoming all identities and ensuring that all identities and voices are heard
• Being willing to pause and reflect on what works / what doesn’t work.

On How to Create Moments for Group Reflection

• Giving youth and adults space and time to discuss the “goods” and “bads” of the project
• Taking pauses to allow relationship-building
• Allowing youth and adults to co-author blog posts after events
• Establishing regular and formal check-in meetings

Each of our youth delegates was assigned to a breakout group and tasked with identifying some of the key priorities discussed during the workshop that they felt were most important to include in future youth-adult collaborations. As part of our closing discussion, they were then invited to assemble a “virtual values quilt” that illustrated a collection of features they hoped to see “sewn into” youth and public media projects. The quilt (displayed below) suggested that teens crave youth-adult collaborations that champion compassi​​on, authenticity, and structures that support open collaboration. In viewing the quilt, media creators were encouraged to reflect on ways in which these and other themes can be incorporated into their company media project plans and company cultures.

The “values quilt,” featuring the values  identified by Youth Delegates Cami, Alexis, and Jayden from This Teenage Life

For those who are interested in learning more about the brief and Ben’s talk, the video is available here:

Augmented reality (AR) allows users to see and interact with virtual objects while still seeing their environment. AR is increasingly becoming more common and is being applied to gaming, healthcare, and education. For example, if you have ever played the worldwide phenomenon Pokémon Go, then you have used an AR application, with which you saw and collected virtual Pokémon in your environment.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality application for smartphones [Image Public Domain]

AR applications can be created for a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, as well as headsets. Compared to hand-held devices, AR headsets provide mobility and hands-free capabilities, which increases user immersion and freedom. AR headsets are beginning to enter consumer markets, and children are starting to use them in classrooms, museums, and at home.

A child interacting with an augmented reality (AR) headset. Photo credit: Barry Joseph.

However, if you are interested in designing new AR headset experiences for children, where should you start? Now that it’s becoming more common for children to use AR headsets, we need to know how children think about these devices and their expectations so we can design better experiences for them. If a child tries to use an AR headset and it does not match their expectations, it can lead to errors, frustration, and even device or application abandonment. Also, it has been well-established that children often interact differently with technology and have different expectations than adults.

Recently, in collaboration with my colleagues from University of Florida and University of Washington, we examined how children think about AR headsets. We conducted four online participatory design sessions over Zoom with KidsTeam UW, which is an intergenerational co-design group from the University of Washington led by Dr. Jason Yip, one of my colleagues in this project. KidsTeam UW consists of children (ages 7 to 12) and adult design researchers that partner together to design new technologies for and with children.

Child participant’s AR game from Day 1 (left) and child participant’s design using Legos from Day 2 (right). [Images from Woodward et al. CHI 2022, see paper reference below].

For the design sessions, we focused on designing content for AR headsets with an emphasis on using them for everyday tasks (e.g., any kind of job, chore, or project). We wanted to see what types of tasks the children would be interested in using AR for and how they want the devices to help them in these tasks. The four remote design sessions included:

• Day 1: Design an AR headset game (using craft materials and Google Slides)
• Day 2: Design elements in an AR headset that would be helpful while using Legos (using craft materials, Google Slides, and Legos)
• Day 3: Create a story of using an AR headset for doing a task (using Google Slides)
• Day 4: Finish a story of using an AR headset for one of the tasks from Day 3 (using Google Slides)

We found that children expect highly intelligent AR systems that accept a wide range of input options (e.g., speech, body motion), can recognize and virtually transform their surroundings, provide real-time guidance and suggestions, create immersive environments, and allow them to experience things they could not do in real life. For example, in the quote that led to the title of our paper about this project, one 12-year-old boy said, “I think it would be cool to get stampeded by dinosaurs.” Also, children are in favor of using the headsets for games and difficult tasks, but did not feel they would be useful when they are trying to be creative or when completing easier tasks. As one 8-year-old boy commented, “If people get along easily without it, why do we need it?”

What does this mean for designing future AR experiences for children?

Through examining the children’s designs and how they think about AR headsets, we provide some insights for creating AR headset experiences for children:

• Consider location of objects in display: Based on the children’s designs, we noticed that they expect virtual objects to be on the right-hand side of the AR headset display; however, in past studies, people (adults) have been shown to have a leftward bias, leading to faster detection of objects that appear on the left-hand side. Children’s expectations may be stemming from prior experience with heads-up displays in games and entertainment on other devices they have used. In your designs, when deciding where to place objects in the headset display for children, consider this trade-off between increasing noticeability in general (maybe for more important information) or matching the children’s expectations.
• Provide support only for difficult tasks: We found that children did not want help and guidance from the AR headsets when they thought they could easily do a task themselves. Therefore, when designing AR headset experiences for children, take into account children’s desires to accomplish tasks on their own and only provide support in AR headsets if they are having a hard time.
• Avoid hand gesture commands: The children primarily designed interactions with virtual objects in the AR headset that used speech and body motion. One 10-year-old boy said, “I think it [voice input] would be easiest to do like, um, on short notice. Um, because like, you don’t have to take time to like touch something.” The children rarely thought of interacting with AR objects through specific gesture commands, although this is common in current AR headsets.
• Allow for extensive movement: We found that the children wanted to interact with virtual objects through body motion, such as ducking and dodging virtual cars, fighting, and running. Also, the children wanted to use the AR headsets both indoors and outdoors. Therefore, it is important to allow for extensive mobility, design on-screen information to be visible even in high-sunlight conditions, and plan to recognize whole-body input for AR headset experiences for children.

If you are thinking about how to use or design future AR headset content and experiences for children, we hope these insights will help!

Check out our full paper here.

Julia Woodward, Feben Alemu, Natalia E. López Adames, Lisa Anthony, Jason C. Yip, and Jaime Ruiz. 2022. “It Would Be Cool to Get Stampeded by Dinosaurs”: Analyzing Children’s Conceptual Model of AR Headsets Through Co-Design. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29–May 05, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501979

This work is partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Award #IIS-1750840 and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1842473.

Julia Woodward is a PhD Candidate in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Florida, as well as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research areas focus on examining how to design visual information in augmented reality (AR) headsets for both adults and children, and understanding how to design technology to fit children’s perceptions and interaction behaviors. She will be joining University of South Florida in Fall 2022 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.