As education researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders have recognized the importance of helping young people engage with computing, many parents and other adult caregivers have bought coding toys and kits for their children to use at home. Parents typically decide what coding toys and kits to provide for their children and they can play important roles to support their children’s engagement with these kits. We decided to interview parents with young children (ages 3-9) to explore what kinds of roles parents might be playing at home and to gather parents’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of engaging their children in these experiences. Below are some of our key findings. For more details, please see our recently published paper in the CHI 2020 proceedings titled “Considering Parents in Coding Kit Design: Understanding Parents’ Perspectives and Roles.”
Parents Expect Coding Kits to Provide Fun and Rich Learning Experiences
Parents expect that playing with coding kits can help kids understand coding concepts, become more competent in technical skills, and get more prepared for the future
Parents expect their kids to have fun and meaningful interactions with coding kits, rather than randomly pressing buttons or passively watching the screen
Parents expect that coding kits should both be engaging and scaffold their children’s learning experience
Parents Play a Variety of Roles
Teacher: parents teach children how to use a coding kit, how to create a code, and help debug code
Collaborator: parents and children brainstorm ideas together, or take turns with a kit
Spectator: parents act as an audience like watching their children’s play and providing encouragement
Scaffolder: parents suggest a child try different ways of playing, or ask questions to scaffold the play
Logistics supporter: parents help with logistics of children’s play, such as setting up a kit and changing batteries
Enforcer: parents mediate conflicts between siblings, suggest siblings to take turns, and remind children the playtime
Gatekeeper: parents test a coding kit before introducing it to children or decide which kit, when, and where to play
Executor: children ask parents to do something for them, such as passing tiles and building obstacles for the play
Dominator: parents take over the play and take away from children’s participation
Parents See Many Benefits Including Family Bonding
Engaging with the kits changes parents’ perceptions of coding from something complex and inaccessible to something everyone can understand and engage in
Coding as a medium for family bonding, e.g., coding together and getting kids to learn parents’ occupations
Children learn computational thinking and technical skills, such as planning and problem-solving
Parents Feel Unsure How Best to Help Their Children
Some parents think they are not being helpful for their children’s learning due to their lack of coding knowledge
Some parents are unsure how to scaffold the experience, especially when their children encounter bugs in the code or the code is not working in desired ways
Our findings shed light on some research and design implications around parents, children, and learning with coding kits. For example:
How to balance children’s need for parental support and parents’ expectation for children to be independent learners
Explore what and how children are learning from coding kits as well as make the learning more visible to both children and parents
Include design features and activity strategies that can engage children in meaningful ways even without the presence of professional educators to scaffold the learning experience, e.g., adding tip-sheet style materials that suggest activities based on computing concepts
Support collaborative play, especially among siblings
Overall, this work expands the understanding of parent-child interaction in children’s use of educational technologies, particularly with growing uses of coding kits and toys at home. We hope to help coding kit designs that consider the important roles and perspectives of parents to better support children’s playful exploration and invention with coding.