I recently had the chance to chat with Michael Preston, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, for a new episode of the Designing for Children’s Best podcast, produced by the Designing for Children’s Rights Association. The result was an inspiring conversation between Michael and myself, Polina Lulu, regarding one of Michael’s recent talks, “Building a Positive Digital Future for Kids, with Kids—Together.” We dove into each of the title words individually and in relation to each other. I’m happy to share a sneak peek into some of the highlights here: 

• Building: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center operates within a vast ecosystem of multidisciplinary professionals: academics, industry practitioners, founders, philanthropists, policy-makers, educators, librarians, and other stakeholders who are interested in children’s media, what it means, and how to leverage it. An important part of the job is to elevate the most important issues and get lots of smart people thinking about them together—“which frankly is a dream job for me”, adds Michael, with a smile. It’s easy to agree with that sentiment, isn’t it?
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  Polina Lulu and Michael Preston

  Positive: As a research and innovation lab, one of the Cooney Center’s main goals is to keep reaching out into new spaces where emerging technology and media are happening. This means always taking part in helping others in the field to think “like Sesame would,” and making the most of these elements in ways that would best benefit kids.

• Digital: Within the climate of concerned rhetoric surrounding digital environments for kids, in which the focus is mainly on safety, a lack of safety, and the presence of realistic harms, it is important to also make space for imagining: What do we really want here? What values do we integrate into our designs? How can digital complete and enhance off-line human outcomes and experiences? 
• Future: Any thoughts about building a desirable future must begin with relevant questions, such as: How do we incorporate future thinking into today’s actions and decisions? Who decides what’s right for the children? What does it mean to respect children’s views? How can we support kids on their journey to developing into their future better self (their own selves, and not necessarily the one we wish for them)? These questions and more are threaded throughout the episode.  
• For kids: You’ll hear how the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is driven by the idea that it’s possible to position kids at the center and prioritize their wellbeing in the work you do, and how they are supporting others in the field to do the same. 
• With kids: Kids can be our partners in design. Cooperative inquiry or co-design is an ideal way to engage kids early in the product design process. It is a special way to effectively help everyone involved interact democratically and truly prioritize the kids’ views on what something new—made especially for them—should be like.
• Together: Learn about a unique Cooney Center Sandbox initiative: a product research lab where children’s voices count. As Michael explains, “the idea is that we could entice designers and developers of technology to want to play with kids in a creative space, and that would benefit everybody. There’s a certain open endedness and egalitarian aspect that the word ‘sandbox’ connotes, that would help us convey what it is a little bit more easily.”  

The full conversation is above. In the meantime, I leave you with Michael’s words:

“Today’s media is obviously moving much more rapidly and is more pervasive. Everybody’s connected all the time. Everybody’s a creator and a consumer at the same time. What does that mean? How do we continue to advocate for kids? It’s a really interesting question to ask every day, and a good challenge for  us.”  

This million-dollar question is what Michael, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, D4CR, and many other dear industry partners (and probably you!) are acting upon on a regular basis: “What is in our hands to do today?” The answers may vary unpredictably every single day.  

We invite you to listen to the full episode. May it encourage more conversations and collaborations towards a better present and future for the ones we care about the most: kids.

 

Polina Lulu is a child experience researcher, designer, consultant, and speaker, dedicated to enhancing learning, play, and well-being across technology, products, and experiences—made for or used by kids. She is the co-host of Designing for Children’s Best, a podcast by the Designing for Children’s Rights Association.

Designing for Children’s Rights (DC4R) is a global non-profit association, supporting the Designing for Children’s Rights Guide that integrates the U.N. rights of the child in design, business and development of products and services around the world.

When I was a fourth-grade teacher, a minor scandal broke out when a student—who had proudly shared his private password with several friends—logged into our school library platform to find that all of his contacts and corresponding book recommendations had been deleted. This wasn’t due to a system glitch or the accidental click of a button—instead, a nascent classroom hacker had used that freely shared password to play a practical joke on her classmate.

Looking back, this incident might have served as a powerful teachable moment about some of the practical and ethical considerations associated with going online, though I didn’t consider it at the time. Like many elementary school teachers, I was already overwhelmed by my other core teaching responsibilities and uncertain about how to navigate this emerging domain of children’s digital privacy and security education.

In 2021, I was happy to have the opportunity to revisit this subject when I joined the Security & Privacy Education 4 Kids (SPE4K) Project as a PhD student researcher, where I worked with Drs. Jessica Vitak and Tamara Clegg from the University of Maryland and Dr. Marshini Chetty from the University of Chicago to develop elementary classroom privacy and security learning resources in collaboration with local Maryland and Chicago public school teachers. Through this work, I came to better understand the importance of introducing privacy and security concepts to young children to prepare them for dilemmas they will face as they grow older and as technology continues to evolve.

One classroom activity our team has found promising in helping children grapple with the nuances of everyday privacy and security challenges is hypothetical scenarios, like those posed in the game, ‘Would You Rather’. For example, a teacher might ask their class:

• Would you rather give a stranger your house key, or let a stranger read your diary?
• Would you rather use your face as a password, but school could always see your location, or enter a long hard password, but school couldn’t see your location?
• Would you rather get a social media account now, but your parents could post about you on it, or wait until you’re thirteen, but only you could post on it?

Like most privacy- and security-related decisions, these hypothetical dilemmas lack clear “right” or “wrong” answers, rendering them useful conversation starters to help children examine how privacy and security concerns surface in their everyday lives and to think critically about their priorities with respect to these topics. Additionally, the playful – and sometimes outlandish – nature of these dilemmas provides opportunities for children to think about privacy and security beyond the constraints of their everyday lives, in which parent and teacher supervision often limits or dictates what choices children can, and do, make.

 

Our Research Approach

We developed six privacy and security ‘Would You Rather’ scenarios and shared them with 13 elementary teachers to gain insight into the feasibility and appeal of using this type of learning activity in the classroom. We also ran the activity with three intergenerational co-design teams to examine how children evaluated the pros and cons of the scenarios. In these sessions, children and adult participants cast their votes on a given scenario before engaging in a whole-group discussion about the rationales behind their choices and their relative advantages and disadvantages.

Privacy & Security Would-you-Rather Scenarios

Scenario 1:	Scenario 2:
Scenario 3:	Scenario 4:
Scenario 5:	Scenario 6:

 

Our Findings

In addition to being perceived by teachers as relatively easy to implement and adapt to their students’ interests and learning needs, we found that this ‘Would You Rather’ activity was useful in eliciting children’s priorities, mental models, and context-based considerations when evaluating hypothetical privacy and security threats. We observed that children frequently attended to the following criteria:

• The potential for embarrassment. In evaluating the prospect of personal embarrassment, children considered the nature of the exposed information (e.g., “super duper secrets” versus “not very embarrassing” secrets) and the extent to which their personal control over this information might be compromised. For example, one 7-year-old said she was “worried about somebody posting something that I don’t want posted, like a picture of me with the worst hair style, but they think it’s pretty.”
• Implications for personal relationships. Children often reflected on how their privacy and security missteps could negatively impact their friends and family. An 11-year-old shared her concern that her dad’s work information could get hacked if she wasn’t careful when using his computer, while a 9-year-old worried a game company might “hack into your device and send a message in your private chat to say, ‘I’m not your friend anymore, go away.’”
• Strategies for ‘winning’ the game. Many children capitalized upon loopholes afforded by the playful and hypothetical nature of the dilemmas we posed.  For example, a 10-year-old explained how he could “cheat the system” by simply deleting anything his parents posted about him on social media, demonstrating his desire to outsmart those who might pose a risk to his privacy as well as the constraints of the game.
• Established privacy and security norms and mental models. Children also frequently referenced the rules (or lack thereof) to which they were accustomed in their everyday home and school environments. Most indicated they were comfortable with the rules put in place for them by adults, but suspicious of the “weird and sketchy stuff” a company might do with their information.

Our Recommendations for Educators

We offer the following recommendations for using hypothetical privacy and security dilemmas in the classroom and beyond.

• Build on children’s unique experiences, values, beliefs, and interests. Rather than looking for gaps in children’s knowledge, this discussion-based activity can serve as a valuable informal assessment to help educators build upon students’ assets and prior knowledge. This can, in turn, inform the refinement and development of additional classroom-specific privacy and security dilemmas.
• Follow children’s lead. Children’s reinvention of the confines of these hypothetical dilemmas can provide opportunities for them to engage in the types of flexible thinking and attention to context demanded of real world privacy- and security-related decision-making. Accordingly, we recommend educators focus on helping children accept and navigate this ambiguity, rather than imposing ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers, as is characteristic of more punitive privacy and security learning approaches.
• Don’t just facilitate–participate! While several of the co-facilitators in our ‘Would You Rather’ sessions were privacy and security scholars, this level of expertise is not required to engage in these types of discussions with children. By modeling their thought processes as they work through various personal concerns and priorities, educators can authentically communicate the nuanced thinking required—of, not only children, but also adults—when making privacy and security decisions.

Check out our full paper here.

Blinder, E., Chetty, M., Vitak, J., Torok, Z., Fessehazion, S., Yip, J., Fails, J.A., Bonsignore, E., & Clegg, T. (2024). Discussing privacy and security tradeoffs with children using hypothetical ‘Would You Rather’ scenarios. Proceedings of the ACM: HCI, 8, CSCW1.

 

Elana Blinder is a doctoral candidate at UMD’s College of Information Studies, with a focus on Child-Computer Interaction and the Learning Sciences. Her current research explores how reflection, supported by tools and processes co-designed with children, can influence children’s design learning and identity development.

Key ideas and recommendations for edtech developers

Children aren’t small adults. This might seem obvious to parents and educators, but, as we learned in our research for the recently released whitepaper, Context Is Everything: Reimagining Edtech for Early Learners, some designers (and purchasers) of edtech tools for elementary learners neglect this basic fact – which may explain in part why 70% of teachers in a recent Seesaw survey indicated that the edtech tools they use in their classrooms do not adequately meet the unique needs of early learners.

We witnessed this firsthand in our work with organizations that were exploring opportunities to incorporate speech recognition into education solutions for younger learners. At the time, speech recognition was an emerging technology, and the machine learning that drove most of the systems had been trained using adult voices. This created a major problem because, as noted by Patricia Scanlon, who founded Soapbox Labs to develop the first speech technology platform for young children, “adults are not children; children have shorter, thinner vocal tracks.” We realized then that, ultimately, a crucial element of the technology simply hadn’t been designed for children—and this phenomenon presented itself again and again. 

In our interviews for the paper, we were able to uncover a few reasons why it has been difficult to create and deploy edtech solutions that have been specifically designed for children. First, there is a challenge inherent in the logistics of involving young children in the design process. It is crucial to include representative sets of students who would use the software in the iterative design process to understand what is and isn’t working. However,  without the correct connections, resources, or expertise it can be hard for some to get that exposure, leaving them to use adults as proxies for their students’ needs and considerations. Moreover, children don’t learn in isolation, so a user-centered design process – which includes the entire learning loop of parents, educators, and peers in evaluating the experience – is critical. 

Second, on the consumer side, considerations relating to cost and efficiency have led district administrators to adopt tools, like learning management systems, which are designed for and used in their middle and high schools—but perhaps not as effective in elementary classrooms. Finally, most parents believe their children already spend too much time in front of a screen, particularly in preschool and elementary school; historically, elementary educators have balked at incorporating technology in their classrooms as well. This resistance disincentivized companies from investing in developing tools specifically for younger students. 

The good news is that those resistant attitudes toward edtech have started to shift as parents and elementary teachers increasingly find value in technology when used appropriately and with balance. Additionally, a growing body of research (including our own) provides guidance for edtech developers who are interested in designing tools for young learners. 

In our paper, we organized this guidance around three categories of design principles focused on supporting Joyful, Connected, and Inclusive learning experiences. Here, we would like to focus on two that we think are particularly important and perhaps counterintuitive: designing edtech with the child’s offline experience in mind and centering joyful learning in edtech.

Design Edtech with the Child’s Off-Line Experience in Mind

First, to truly support these young students, edtech solutions need to be carefully designed with their developmental needs and classroom realities in mind. While it may seem counterintuitive if you are developing, for instance, a learning app for young students, good edtech built for early learners should integrate into their physical environment and augment and work alongside them. Solutions should augment hands-on, experiential learning rather than supplant it. A big part of this means striking the balance between on- and off-line learning. When thinking through solution design, consider the use case: how will the tool be used? How can it support social learning with peers, students, or families? How will a student be able to translate online activities into the real world? And share off-line activities back to their community? Solutions should enhance, not replace, tangible interactions and opportunities for students to engage with the broader classroom environment. Edtech should also recognize the crucial partnership between school and families in elementary classrooms. Parents or guardians are a child’s first teachers, so tools should engage families as partners with their own set of interactions into the learning process, not just provide information outwards. Actively inviting families to participate is crucial and can spark excitement, further engaging students in the learning process. As such, ensuring connectivity not just between students and teachers, but also with peers and parents, is critical. 

Centering Joyful Learning in Edtech

Extensive research highlights the importance of joy, curiosity, and play in early learning. A longitudinal study found that a child’s school enjoyment level by age six is positively associated with their academic achievement through adolescence. This is a concept that most people probably intuitively understand—all the individuals we interviewed certainly got it. But there is a tension here as elementary schools turn to edtech for somewhat un-playful tasks like assessing and monitoring learning. It’s easy to conflate “joyful learning” with “fun,” however. A tool that, for instance, provides students with an academic experience—let’s say solving some math problems—followed by a fun experience—e.g., a mini-game—is missing the point. 

The learning should happen through the joyful experience; indeed, it’s more likely to happen through joyful experiences. Designing joyful edtech means creating playful, multimodal, active, and creative hands-on learning experiences that provide engaging opportunities to gain skills while nurturing a lifelong love of learning. Children feel like they are genuinely included in the learning and take on the task confidently. These tools can be fun, but, more importantly, they should inspire curiosity that leads to further inquiry. Delight, not “drill and kill,” should drive solution design.

To ensure edtech solutions meet the unique needs of early learners, developers should ask themselves the following questions:

• Do our solutions support joyful, active learning? Do they promote student relationships and connect online learning with real-world activities?
• Are we just communicating with families or inviting them into the learning process? Have we made assumptions that overlook variability among early learners?
• How can we balance screen time and ensure both online and off-line learning experiences? Do tools fade into the classroom background while enhancing the learning context?
• Does the solution align with child development research on how young children learn best through play, exploration, and joy?
• Does the solution consider the major changes in physical and academic capabilities as children grow?

By considering these factors, edtech developers can design tools and solutions that uniquely meet early learners’ needs, supporting their overall well-being and learning goals from an early age. Children are certainly not adults, but we should do all we can to equip them with the tools they need to learn, grow, and explore so they can reach their fullest potential as they grow up.

 

 

Daimen Sagastume is a director at Whiteboard Advisors, where he specializes in advocacy and growth enablement across the Pre-K-12 education space. He comes to Whiteboard Advisors after five years at Emerson Collective, where he managed the education philanthropy investment portfolio, in addition to incubating a seed stage ed-tech company, Uppercase, which aims to democratize access to the best teaching knowledge in the world.

 

Evo Popoff is Senior Vice President at Whiteboard Advisors. He has spent much of his career working closely with states, districts and schools to help them develop and implement effective school turnaround, after-school, online, and blended-learning programs.