On May 23, 2022, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center hosted a virtual workshop to support public media professionals in cultivating equitable, collaborative partnerships with tweens and teens. Part of the By/ With/ For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative, the workshop invited producers, directors, and other individuals who are passionate about engaging youth in public media to engage in thoughtful discussions about the best ways for public media stations to deepen their understanding of tweens and teens, and how to leverage this understanding to create high-quality, youth-targeted content.

Cooney Center Senior Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Washington Jason Yip delivered an informative presentation about strategies for effective adult-youth co-design. With “Examining Adult-Child Interactions in Participatory Design,” Jason summarized the theoretical basis of effective and equitable partnerships between children and adults in co-design projects. Theories were illustrated through vivid participatory design case studies from his own co-design work with KidsTeam UW.

Aligning with the workshop’s central topic (creating programs by, for, and with youth), Jason’s presentation spotlighted several tested strategies that adult creators can use to ensure that they are treating children as equal design partners, allowing youth to actively and equitably inform the process of designing technology and media.  

Jason’s presentation covered youth co-design theories and methods that were successful in technology development contexts, and that can also be applied to digital media content creation He defines participatory design as a co-design strategy that allows users and designers to collaborate in the earliest stages of the design process, to develop effective new technologies. One type of participatory design that was highlighted in the presentation is cooperative inquiry, which involves children working with adults throughout the process of designing technology (Yip 2013). 

Jason noted that projects that successfully leverage cooperative inquiry are founded on equal partnerships between children (product testers and informants) and adults (test facilitators and interpreters of children’s feedback). In equal partnerships, users and creators have equal standing, and have an equal voice in the creation process. 

Jason suggested that the central ingredient for equal partnerships is balance: a state in which children and adults can equally contribute to projects.

Through illustrative video case studies from his own projects, Jason demonstrated how the concept of balance should be made manifest across the four dimensions of adult-child partnerships: 

• Relationship-building
• Facilitation
• Design-by-doing
• Elaborating together

At the end of his presentation, Jason provided attendees with three actionable takeaways for creators to consider when implementing co-design: 

• Equal partnerships exist on a spectrum and are not simply completely equal or unequal.
• The four dimensions of equal partnerships (relationships, facilitation, design-by-doing, and elaborate together) are connected.
• The participatory design framework can be used across any cases in which there are power differentials between users and designers (e.g., when designers are working with vulnerable populations).

Following Jason’s presentation, attendees were assigned to breakout rooms, where they read quotes shared by the Next Gen Public Media Youth Fellows. Each breakout room received quotes that centered on one of three topics: “Interactions and Relationships with Adults,” “Digital Platforms and Affordances,” and “Changes in Media Use from Middle to High School.” Each attendee shared one quote that was most compelling to them. Many rich ideas were generated from these sessions, providing attendees with actionable strategies for optimizing their work to more equitably center youth voices. 

Afterward, attendees engaged in another breakout room session where they collaboratively reflected on the extent to which their projects were adequately addressing youth needs.

To end the workshop, all attendees reflected on one tangible step that they can take to further develop and apply their understanding of youth.

Attendees came away from the session with a stronger understanding of equitable ways to engage tweens and teens in media projects, a deeper understanding of the challenges and affordances that teens encounter when using digital media, and actionable steps for supporting participatory collaboration in their own projects and organizations.

Josanne Buchanan is a children’s media and psychology researcher who leverages high-quality arts and science research to support all content creators in developing excellent children’s media. Josanne has several years of experience developing educational digital media, consulting with media industry leaders, conducting user research, and working directly with children in the non-profit sector. Situated at the nexus between psychology and the screen, her work provides industry leaders with insights that are crucial for developing content that promotes diversity, inclusion, and prosocial learning. Her commitment to ensuring that all children see themselves fully represented on screen fuels her work to support producers, game-developers, curriculum specialists, and more.

Roblox is the only example I can think of when I was a child that was open world with endless possibilities, as limited as it was in 2008, it was still a great opportunity for interaction and creativity
—20-something Roblox developer

The “gamification of learning” is a common theme in education and edtech, but as we observe the emerging metaverse at Dubit, we’re thinking about the “learnification of gaming.”

“Gamification of learning” leverages game design features and mechanics to deliver a curriculum in a playful way. By contrast, today teens and even tweens are creating games and experiences around the ideas, subjects, characters, stories, and brands that inspire them on the interactive platforms that are integral to their daily lives.

On proto-metaverse gaming platforms like Minecraft, Fortnite Creative, and especially Roblox, young people are deeply engaged with coding and creative development. They’re intrinsically motivated to turn their ideas into immersive playable games, social spaces, and even learning experiences.

Some create for their own satisfaction, happy just to make a working game or immersive experience. Others share their work narrowly, with a few friends or family. Many offer up their creations on global platforms. A small percentage even become young entrepreneurs, making money and building the foundation of a career. At Dubit, an increasing number of the developers in our metaverse studio are young adults who began making games as teens.

One role model for the “learnification of gaming” is Michael Sayman, once Facebook’s youngest employee. In the introduction to his book App Kid, the story of his self-education as a teen developer, Sayman writes: “Since middle school, I’ve probably spent 40 hours a week building websites and making apps – roughly 30,000 hours – and I still don’t consider myself an expert, let alone a master. I’ll always be learning and that’s what I love about my job. I code because I lose track of time when I’m doing it —I’m never bored. If I were, a lifetime of hours could never make me great.”

 

Inspiration drives innovation

Dubit surveyed a number of young Roblox developers about how they got started with coding and game design.

Some create the content that they would want to consume. One developer told us, “Whatever I would want to play myself is the type of game that I would make.” Another said: “I just make something I know I’d have fun playing with my friends.” It’s an iterative process—learning through playing helps young developers understand what kinds of features are most engaging and in what contexts, which they then incorporate into their own builds.

Dubit often refers to Roblox as the “YouTube of games.” With over 40 million titles made by everyone from kids to professional studios, the platform has near-infinite models that new developers can use to spark their learning or reimagination. And fittingly, young developers look to online videos, where game-makers share tools and techniques to solve design problems.

One young developer told us, “I take inspiration from other experiences that I like/that are popular, and utilize that in my own original idea.” Another echoed that,  “I use a lot of reference images when building, but it’s all unique with an incredible amount of inspiration!”

There are also toolkits on Roblox’s developer website, not to mention myriad YouTube tutorials. One creator described his path: “I started with the basics on Roblox’s ‘Learn Roblox’ section of their Developer websites, creating a small number of simple experiences based on the tutorials provided (with my own modifications). Following these to a point where I felt relatively comfortable, I utilized what I learned in order to make a simple rhythm/dancing game, which became my first game on Roblox.”

Many emerging creators seek communities to share expertise or build together. To support and connect independent game builders, Roblox created a Team Create feature, which one respondent said “allows us to work very quickly without a lot of the technical issues that other platforms and software development runs into.“ The platform itself serves as a convening place for collaboration: “I’m part of a variety of communities on Roblox that were needing a virtual environment to share ideas, roleplay or have fun.“

Roblox uses its own coding language, but as developers master it, they often want to learn to build for other platforms. Several Dubit builders have also taught themselves Unity and Unreal; one who was looking to expand explained that “No developer should limit their abilities.“ 

From game-builder to team member

Teaching oneself to create games, whether independently or with others, is a great start toward becoming a professional, but it takes more than programming know-how to build a career.

As Dubit has expanded its team, we’ve found a great symbiosis in hiring young, substantially self-taught developers. We get experienced programmers who are platform natives, with a deep understanding of what they and other gamers want. Our hires are then exposed to a 20-year-old game-design company’s experience in teamwork and business development—invaluable for those that would like to set up their own studio in future.

One young programmer praised the benefit of gaining both “software development ideas and practices as well as client communications.” Another spoke of learning “a variety of things that can make a game good or bad, in both experiencing it, and releasing it to the public.“

Placed on a team that demands varied skills to meet its goals, each member is exposed to new elements of the business. One respondent said he’d “learned many key tools & techniques in programming, both in Roblox specifically, as well as in general programming, as well as further improving myself in some project workflow types.”

Transforming the workplace

The coronavirus pandemic drastically changed every workplace, but the game industry may have been best positioned to manage disruption. The tools of game-building don’t require teams to be co-located, and young game designers were already used to working from home.

As much as young people’s home-grown skills sustained the games business during COVID, there’s no question that they will equally transform the workplace going forward. Many who now work for us (and other game firms) will go on to form their own game companies. They’ll take their training with them, around motivation and mindset, even ethics, as one of my colleagues put it.

They’ll put their generational twist on things, though, based on a lifetime of playing games. “Experiencing & building virtual worlds from a young age,” one developer wrote, “has helped me realize what I would prefer to do/see most in the metaverse, in both a professional and personal sense.”

According to Yonatan Raz-Fridman, CEO of Supersocial: “We need to reevaluate what it means to make all of these technologies available to young people who can actually build businesses in their bedrooms when they’re 15. The type of experiences or work environments that a 16-or-17-year-old would create in a platform like Roblox [is] very different than what a 35-plus-year-old is going to create.”

Improving virtual environments will surely play a role in these new collaborative designs, such as the ability for a team to manipulate three-dimensional representations of spaces and products, whether they are in one place or far apart. While we often think of gaming as competitive, metaverse games are just as often collaborative and almost always social. We think emerging workplaces will be the same, with multi-disciplinary teams combining toward a stronger whole.

After extended on-and-off isolation and distance schooling, we are hopeful that the teens and young adults who passed their lockdowns in self-guided, intrinsically-driven learning will emerge from the pandemic with their motivation and engagement intact. We’re eager to see how a cohort of entrepreneurial creators, buoyed by the “learnification of gaming,” breaks forth, ready to build new worlds–in physical space and within the metaverse.

 

 

David Kleeman is Senior Vice President of Global Trends for Dubit, a metaverse studio and consultancy. He is a 35-year children’s media veteran – a strategist, analyst, author and speaker, connecting ideas and people in media, education, research and child development.