Meagan Rothschild

Children construct meaning through their play spaces not only by employing the cultural representations of toys, games, video programming, or other forms of transmedia storytelling, but by becoming active participants in the process of play. Media use is ubiquitous in early childhood, and when used within developmentally appropriate frameworks, can effectively promote learning and development for young children. This has been demonstrated extensively through television and games research. As new technologies have evolved that allow television audiences to move into the role of active physical participant, researchers and product developers are interested in the ways children demonstrate learning through their experiences with these newer technologies. This research began as an exploratory study to identify themes and connections between bidirectional television viewing and children’s meaning-making through participation with an episode of Kinect Sesame Street TV.
The introductory analysis provided the data to investigate more deeply around questions that probe the nature of social mediation through joint media engagement, as parents and caregivers engaged with the child participant during the episode. A study postmortem also provides a detailed reflection on the design process and interaction outcomes of playfully situated assessment activities, applying the implications of the outcomes to not just media evaluation research, but to assessment development for early learners.
The study of participant experiences in this research, including the analysis of how participants talk about their play experiences and how designed media elements present in child narratives, researchers, developers, and educators can gain insight into design issues and potential opportunities for learning and improve the quality of interactive multimedia products that support digital literacies, content exploration, and discovery. The outcomes from this and future studies can continue to inform design, from specific recommendations on interactions to broader design for learning questions, such as how activities move a participant towards meaning-making, how activities and practices empower participants to make larger connections beyond the product, and given what we know and are continuing to learn about the ways children learn through and engage with their mediated narrative experiences, how products can serve as a catalyst for deeper engagement and creative expression.

Metacognition, or the ability to be consciously and intentionally aware of one's thinking and the ways in which one's thinking impacts one's learning, has been shown in the research to be a critical component of learners' abilities to learn effectively. One area of research on metacognition has focused on the role of metacognition in video games, specifically in massively multiplayer online games, known as MMOs. Through examples of metacognition in a popular video game such as World of Warcraft or in Adventure Academy, a new educational MMO for children ages 8–13 years old, this chapter highlights the ways in which MMOs can act as spaces that support the development of metacognitive behaviors through the components of planning, monitoring, control, and evaluation, toward improving learning overall.

Despite recent advances in technology, personalized learning to address diverse needs of students remains difficult to achieve at scale. With the availability and affordability of smart devices in the era of the Internet of Things, learners, parents, and educators are more “connected” than ever before. Education stakeholders and technology developers can leverage these advances to collect data about, inform, deliver, and improve education for all learners. In this paper, we review the core components of a Smart Learning framework and describe a personalized mastery-based learning system that leverages the framework to deliver personalized learning at scale. In the context of Smart Learning in the Internet of Things, we propose an Ambient and Pervasive Personalized Learning Ecosystem (APPLE), a learner-centered approach that uses Bloom’s Four Agents of Change in the Internet of Things ecosystem to provide learners a comprehensive and personalized learning experience. This ecosystem u...

Microsoft Studios has recently released Kinect Sesame Street TV, a new form of media for television that merges traditional means of watching episodes with game like physical actions via the Xbox and Kinect. This paper presents an overview and early findings of an initial study that investigated how ideas of embodied cognition and comprehension can be leveraged to understand the experiences of three and four year old participants, and explore the ways in which bidirectional television can facilitate new meaning-making. Early research took place at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, and analysis is continuing at [removed for blind review]. The findings inform the development and design of other interactive television products and programs for early learners. The presentation also breaks down directions for future analysis, showing how initial findings illustrated a need for deeper research and analysis in the nuanced ways young children learn and demonstrate knowledge.

Bi-directional television, programs that engage viewers through physical responsiveness, provides a new medium for joint media engagement that incorporates in-room contexts. This could hold promise for younger learners, particularly as children’s media research has demonstrated how intergenerational screen time and instructive mediation can result in positive outcomes. This case study investigates the experiences of two children and their caregivers as they engage with an episode of Kinect Sesame Street Television. The findings demonstrate that meaningful interaction between a caregiver and child are supported by (though not a requirement for) physically interactive designs. In addition, the study shows that as young viewers gain expertise in this genre, instructive mediation may be initiated by the adult OR child.