Winter 2025
Exploring Photography and Social Media Guidelines in Childcare Institutions
Instructors: Meghna Gupta, Julie Kientz
Photography and social media sharing in childcare institutions has become widespread, serving diverse purposes such as documenting educational activities, capturing moments of fun, promoting the institution, and providing parents with visual updates. However, these practices raise significant ethical considerations around consent, privacy, and digital safety — particularly in how they intersect with children’s agency, parental expectations, and the responsibilities of childcare workers.
This DRG aims to investigate how childcare institutions navigate these complexities through both formal policies and informal practices, examining the structural frameworks of institutional guidelines as well as the lived experiences of childcare providers, parents, and children.
The students will be expected to assist in conducting the following activities over the course of the DRG (tentative):
- Analysis of Institutional Policies: We will crowdsource and collaboratively analyze institutional policies and practices around photo-taking and social media sharing.
- Semi-Structured Interviews with Providers and Parents: We will conduct semi-structured interviews or focus groups with childcare providers and parents to gather deeper insights into their understanding of institutional policies, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use to navigate expectations around photo-taking and sharing practices.
- Participatory Design Activities with Children: We will use participatory design techniques to capture children’s views and experiences.
Enrollment information
- Meeting time: To be determined based on student availability.
- Credits: Students will receive 2 credits for successful completion of the DRG which will be determined by active participation in course discussion and completion of the project.
- Who should apply: We are looking for 2-4 undergraduate or graduate students. Ideal students will have completed basic coursework in HCDE, undergraduates or graduates, experience with conducting user studies, qualitative analysis, interest in digital safety, child-computer interaction, and social media.
- This DRG counts toward the directed research requirement for PhD students.
- To apply: Please complete this Google Form.
- Questions? Contact Meghna Gupta (megupta@uw.edu)
Winter 2025
Designing a Desktop App for Storing Virtual Memories
Led by: Nisha Devasia, PhD student
Advised by: Julie Kientz, HCDE Professor
Long distance relationships are becoming increasingly common, typically because one partner is pursuing educational or employment opportunities. Anywhere from 25-50% of college students report being in a LDR. People in LDRs often play video games together as a way to stay connected, and the facilitators have run a study investigating these dynamics. In a DRG last spring, students used these findings to prototype a digital diary app that couples could use to store virtual memories made together. This DRG will be focused on building that app and user test it with couples. The facilitator (Nisha) is a former software engineer and has partially built out some of the functionality, and a REU student has created a working Figma prototype that we will be recreating.
Enrollment information
- Meeting time: To be determined based on student availability
- Credits: 2-3 credits (e.g., 6-9 hours total of meeting and outside work)
- Who should apply:
- 2-4 students (undergraduate or graduate)
- Extensive experience with EITHER frontend or backend software engineering. Fullstack ideal but not required.
- To apply: Fill out this Google Form.
- Questions? Contact Nisha at ndevasia@uw.edu
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.