Autumn 2024
Designing and Analyzing Co-Creative Gameplay for Parents and Children
Led by Adrian Rodriguez (PhD Student, HCDE), with supervision from Julie Kientz (Professor, HCDE)
How does multimodality affect engagement among children and parents during construction-oriented play? Constructionism, a growing pedagogy, posits that children learn most when they “construct meaningful products,” especially in collaborative contexts. While Joint Media Engagement, a form of multiplayer in which parents help maximize learning, flourishes when players “use media to build things.” The popularity of building games also makes joint construction a formative experience for today’s youth. Over 55% of Gen Z has created a Roblox account, LEGO is the most valuable toy company in the world, and nearly half of children aged 3 to 12 actively played Minecraft in 2018. In this DRG, we’ll ask: How do the benefits of co-creation vary across physical and digital mediums? Whom do co-creative experiences exclude? And how can we design co-creative experiences to be as inclusive and productive as possible?
We’ll ground these questions in the instructors’ current research into multimodal digital sandboxes. Following a paper titled Towards Construction-Oriented Play for Vision-Diverse Youth, we have implemented a block-based 3D modeling program that supports both virtual and physical input. This probe’s goal is to understand how varying degrees of multimodality affect experiences of Joint Media Engagement among parents and preschool-aged children during co-creative play. During this DRG, we will discuss the cognitive and critical theories beneath Constructionism, design co-creative activities to promote Joint Media Engagement, collect data from children and parents in a study session, and analyze videos of child-parent dyads creating together.
Enrollment information
- Meeting times will be either:
- Tuesdays from 4 - 6 p.m.
- Thursdays from 4 - 6 p.m.
- Fridays from 1 - 3 p.m.
- Credits: 2
- Who should apply:
- Ideal students will have completed basic coursework in HCDE, played construction-oriented games, bring qualitative analysis experience/aptitude, and appreciate interaction design.
- To apply: Please complete this Google Form.
- Application deadline: September 6, 2024.
- Anticipated notification date: September 10, 2024.
- Questions? Contact Adrian at aarod@uw.edu.