We had a paper presented at the ACM CHI 2021 conference about parental mediation of children’s use of educational media recently. Parental mediation literature is mostly situated in the contexts of television, Internet use, video games, and mobile devices, while there is less understanding of how parents mediate their children’s engagement with educational-focused media. In this study, we performed semi-structured interviews with eighteen parents who obtained coding kits, a creation-oriented educational media that aims to teach young people computer programming and coding, for their young children at home. Our guiding research question is: how do parents mediate young children’s interaction with creation-oriented educational media?
We examined and reported parental involvement from the perspective of mediation in this paper. Specifically, we frame parental mediation practices along three dimensions: (1) creative mediation, where parents medicate to support children’s creating and learning during media use; (2) preparative mediation, where parents explore and prepare media for children’s engagement; and (3) administrative mediation, where parents administer and regulate their children’s media use. Table 1 shows the detailed parental mediation practices under each dimension.
Even though we summarize a variety of parental mediation patterns in children’s use of coding kits, parents mainly take on supportive practices (i.e., creative and preparative mediation), which can be attributed to the educational nature of coding kits and that parents want their children to benefit from playing with coding kits. This finding is different from parental mediation practices reported in the literature that is situated in consumption-oriented media like video games, TV, and the Internet. Additionally, through our study, we see the major limitation of Joint Media Engagement (JME), a frequently cited framework within HCI literature to describe shared media experiences, is that it does not give enough attention to behind-the-scenes work like exploring and preparing media and monitoring media use. Therefore, we propose that JME can be expanded to include all aspects of involvement in shared media engagement, such as supporting and administering one’s media use, as well as new involvement patterns to be discovered in the future.
Finally, we present some implications for designing creation-oriented educational media, such as t including space and resources for supporting both parents as co-creators and children’s independent play, giving more priority to physicality in design, and considering approaches that better support parents as audiences, like commenting on children’s projects and providing encouragement. For more details, go check out the paper!
Paper reference:
Junnan Yu, Andrea DeVore, and Ricarose Roque. 2021. Parental Mediation for Young Children’s Use of Educational Media: A Case Study with Computational Toys and Kits. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 475, 1–12. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445427