Hi there, I’m Junnan Yu from the University of Colorado Boulder
And I’m presenting our paper titled “parental mediation for young children’s use of educational media: a case study with computational toys and kits”
on behalf of my co-authors: Andrea DeVore and Ricarose Roque
Young people today consume lots of media like video games and the Internet
which can bring some benefits and also pose certain challenges
Parents perform various strategies to maximize the benefits and minimize the negative impact of media use
which are framed as parental mediation theory
This theory includes restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-using or co-viewing
As the landscape of media is expanding rapidly
new parental mediation practices are emerging
Therefore, it is necessary to keep exploring parental mediation practices
so that future media design can support productive parent-child interactions
In this paper, we explore parental mediation practices in the context of educational media
and aim to expand the parental mediation theory
We ask: how do parents mediate young children’s use of educational media?
We situate our research in the context of coding kits
Coding kits are toys and apps that are designed to teach children computational thinking and coding skills.
We performed semi-structured interviews with 18 parents who obtained coding kits for their young children at home
Through thematic analysis, we summarized three high-level parental mediation categories
including creative mediation where parents provide support for children’s creating and learning with media
preparative mediation where parents explore and prepare media for children’s engagement
and administrative mediation where parents administer and regulate children’s media use
We identified six creative mediation patterns, including collaborating by participating in children’s play
providing encouragement for children’s projects
providing scaffold to direct children’s play into meaningful directions
respecting children’s play ideas
solving problems children encounter during the play
and teaching children how use a kit and coding skills
Preparative mediation includes exploring media and setting up media
such as investigating new media that can benefit children educationally and setting up devices for children
In administrative mediation, parents control children’s media access, especially with screen-based coding kits
setting rules for children’s interaction with coding kits, and keeping an eye on children’s play
We further examined how parents’ mediation patterns distributed across physical, virtual and hybrid kits
A key finding is that parents reported less access control but more scaffolding, problem-solving and teaching with physical kits than screen-based kits
Importantly, different from consumption-oriented media like TV, Internet, and videos games
parents mainly perform supportive practices with coding kits because of the kits’ educational benefits
Through our findings, the parental mediation theory does not well capture parents’ efforts in preparing the media and helping children to learn from the media
As such, our work expands the parental mediation theory into the context of educational media
Joint Media Engagement is a frequently cited framework within HCI to describe shared media experiences
However, JME does not examine the behind-the-scenes work like exploring, preparing, and administering media use
Therefore, we propose to expand JME to include all aspects of involvement in shared media experiences
Finally, we highlight some implications for designing educational media that support parental involvement
First, we suggest including space and resources to support both parents as co-creators and children’s independent play
Second, we suggest giving more priority to physicality in design because physicality can invite more parental participation
Third, we suggest including approaches that better support parents as audiences
like commenting on children’s projects and providing encouragement in person and remotely
Lastly, we suggest including features that support parents to better scaffold their children’s learning
such as activity prompts that are associated with different learning goals
This is a brief overview of our paper. For more details, please refer to the paper. Thank you for listening