>> Alex Games: Hello everyone. My name is Alex Games and I am education [inaudible]
director at Microsoft Studios in IEB. Today it is my pleasure to introduce Meagan Rothschild.
Meagan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison working with the
Games Learning and Society Center. Over the last few months Meagan has been working on an
MSR internship examining the relationship between playful technologies and lifelong learning,
particularly on women entering the stem fields. One more time, I'm super excited to have
Meagan here and I look forward to hearing what she has to say. Thank you.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: Hello. Today we're going to talk about meaning making in mediated
environments. As Alex said I am currently a Microsoft Research intern. I'm a PhD candidate at
the University of Wisconsin at Madison with the Games Learning and Society Center. I'm an
instructional design specialist and an aspiring educational multimedia fancy pants. But before I
go into what I've been doing, I want to make sure that I say thank you to my two mentors Alex
Games and Rane Johnson. Rane, unfortunately, couldn't be here today. She's really ill, but
hopefully she's watching. Yeah, she's not feeling real well, but I just want to make sure that
they know that this has been an amazing opportunity and I say thank you for this tremendous
opportunity to do this amazing research with kids and women. So what have I done? My
background is actually kind of all over the map. I got my Bachelors and Masters degrees from
the University of Hawaii at Manoa and I worked with a group after teaching high school for six
years and being the site coordinator for technology at the school, doing a lot of professional
development, teaching high school students., I moved into the fields of curriculum design doing
multimedia design for underrepresented groups and then ended up doing game design for
learning games, and it was after that experience I realized it was over and I was convinced by a
few pretty key people including Kurt Squire and Jim G that my life was over. I couldn't go back
to traditional curriculum design and I needed to focus on games and interactive spaces for
learners. So why packed up, moved 5000 miles and moved to the University of Wisconsin
Madison and I do not regret it at all. But what that means is that I'm now in a field of research
and I have my fingers in design but it means I've also come from the world where I've gotten to
see where the rubber hits the road. Doing the transition from teaching at the high school level
to being a curriculum designer, my interests have also shifted because I started with high school
students but my interests have actually gone now the full spectrum and a lot of my interests
are now with younger audiences, but I'm looking at what that means for the future, so my work
does focus on across age groups. So I won't apologize for the fact that I like kids. And this is a
picture that I feel like really kind of grabs hold of the things that I'm talking about. This is a little
friend of mine named Connor and he purchased super Mario Chess not because he wanted to
learn how to play chess, but he thought it was the ideal opportunity to get more Mario guys.
And his T-shirt says expert gamer and he loves the Mario franchise and he's in it like all the
time, but what happens is as he plays it expands outside of what he's doing with the game itself
into his narratives, into his play spaces and Mario isn't something he plays anymore. It's
something he does. It's a set of practices that get him really excited about this narrative world
that he then goes into creative spaces and becomes a codesigner and participant in this
franchise. So that kind of points to something bigger that's happening and this isn't just with
young kids; it happens across the lifespan. So what's important to me is intentionally
leveraging the potential of technology, and so this, do this right. This is kind of like my bottom
line and what that means is that we are tying together education, media and cultural studies
and design for the sake of building good stuff. So I came here to do an internship and it's been
a six-month internship and it's kind of a 50-50 thing between Microsoft Research and Microsoft
Studios and so that's a lot of interests. I've been looking at interactive media, kids, play and
creation spaces, learning and cognition and gender issues, and I mean you could study that for
about 50 careers, but what does that mean for my six months? It means that I have a story to
tell about lifespan technologies. And this story comes together not in the consideration of a
particular piece of hardware and its lifespan, but the fact that our lives are becoming more and
more mediated and so it's our life spans. It's the fact that from the child's early, early years
through retirement and beyond our lives are mediated and what does that mean for things like
learning, entertainment, productivity, citizenship, health, the cost of human life span. So what
I've done is I've been involved in three different studies and they all kind of come together
under this idea. First I want to tell you about a study called Tech Trajec-Stories and it was one
in which I did interviews with several women who are successful in their careers in computer
science, and talking about different values that have been important to them along their life
story and really allowing them to tell me their personal life narrative and what we kind of pulled
and sussed out from those interviews so far. And then I'm going to talk about meaning making
with two-way TV and a study that I got to do with three and four-year-olds in an episode of
Kinect Sesame Street TV and then finally what does that mean in play work spaces and maker
spaces and so looking at how we can do observations that support tele-metric data that's part
of the StudioK curriculum which is around Codu. So I'm going to talk about three different
studies today, but they are all around this idea that they traverse this lifespan for us and bring
us through different levels of participation. So first let's talk about Tech Trajec-Stories. The
research questions were how do successful women in computer science fields described their
life story in terms of play and learning experiences? And what happened was I had read a piece
by Mary Flanagan and she did a lot of value-based research and I was inspired by the research
she did to take it and modify it and so I tweaked that list of values and then moved it into an
interview protocol that was shaped by the women talking about these values. So the 10 values
that we used -- oh, sorry, so the guided interview combined opened ended questions about
their youth activities, learning experiences, opinions about women in stem fields or in
computer science and then the value ranking in the think alouds. And they have like actual
manipulable cards so they were, what I found that that was actually really interesting, was as
we would talk about their ranking of these particular values by having physical objects that they
were working with, the think alouds became really naturally and they would be like well, this is
really important to me but then this was well, because of the situation and then they would talk
their way through the whole thing which actually got some really rich data. So I interviewed six
different women at different phases in their careers. So the values that we were talking about
were access, autonomy, collaboration, community, and creativity and these were the
definitions that I was using with the women. And then diversity, equality, group success,
individual achievement and subversion, so there are different things to consider in the kinds of
outcomes. First of all it was six women. Yeah?
>>: So you said that it was 10 values; how did you choose those 10 values?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: So the majority came from what we know about observations of
group dynamics with matrix basis and also what we know from Mary Flanagan's work in the
value-based research she's done, and so I actually modified those to align tighter with the
research questions that I had.
>>: So you just did your own kind of judgments to come up with those 10 things?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: Uh-huh, but it was grounded in different sets of research and then I
just kind of mushed them all together into something that made a lot of sense for the kinds of
questions I was asking. So factors to consider are that there really were -- there were six
women and for making declarative statements, you can't really make this is a declarative
statement about all women, but it really helps in pulling out themes and understanding what
are some of the things that we see emerging as potential patterns that need to be looked into
more, or that might challenge existing beliefs that we have. So there's definitely factors to
consider like the role of culture, the role of schooling in shaping values as we talked about
certain values. There is interesting language about this was important in elementary school
and so therefore it was important to me and not necessarily that it was important to them, but
they just adopted it as a value because that was what the institutions that they were tightly
identified with at the time said was important. And so language kind of indicates that
difference which is interesting and then also all of the women had pushback against the
structure of traditional institutional education, which will be something in the future that I
would really like to dig into a little bit more. Also the role of peer influences, especially in
middle and high school. More than one participant had a story about how they had a value set
but because of the way they received feedback from their peer group, it shifted and they chose
to do something else. Sometimes not the best decisions either. Then also the potential impact
of family background and socioeconomic status on influences and opportunities, so we need to
consider that that's a lot of things that can vary somebody's experience, but given that some of
the things that we found. In the value ranking what happened was we had the 10 values and I
gave the women the opportunity to rank what typified their experience and what typified what
they felt was important at middle, later elementary school, middle school, high school and then
adult hood, so we had four time markers and then they would rank them and sometimes they
had a really hard time just going 1 to 10 because they would find that some things just were not
important at all and they didn't even want to give it a 10th place because it just shouldn't have
been on the list. And so I gave them the option that if something was not at all a part of their
value set or things they were thinking about, just put it on the side; it doesn't need to get
ranked. In addition, there were things that were tied, and so I did like a golf style ranking, so if
you had a first-place and then a tie for second, the next one would be a fourth. That was how
the ranking happened. What we found was subversion was unranked by all of them in
elementary school, so all six of the women independently, this was one-on-one interviews, like
that was nothing I was even thinking of. And creativity was always ranked across all age groups,
so for these six women this was something that was important whether in elementary school
all the way up to adulthood in some way. Another thing I found was that individual
achievement was nearly always ranked. I think there was one instance where it was not ranked
at all. So that was something that went beyond age groups as well and was always important
for these women who were considered successful right now in computer science. And this one
really interested me. It went from being unranked by four out of the six participants in middle
and high school, so only two people put it in the rankings for middle and high school, to in
adulthood everybody ranking it as something important. So then if you consider what the
averages were for the rankings, that was depending on the number of participants who actually
ranked it. That's where the averages came from. If there was an unranked it just didn't get
considered into the figure. Autonomy dropped an average rank so it was pretty consistent at
around four until adulthood in which it dropped and it wasn't as important even though it still
got ranked. Also, diversity and equality became kind of an interesting flip-flop. So where
equality was little more important in the younger years, it flipped with diversity later on.
Community creativity and individual achievement stayed fairly consistent over time. So in the
range though in looking at what the differences were between the higher ranks and the lower
ranks, for the most part once you hit middle and high school they were all over the place. What
that kind of indicates is that people have very unique personal experiences in middle school
and high school. It's not really a surprise. It's not really saying anything that we don't know,
unless we are starting to say things like girls like this. Girls function in these environments.
High schoolers need this, particularly that interesting one about group work and individual
achievement, you start to hear sometimes people saying when we're designing for younger
audiences, for younger females like maybe upper elementary through younger high school and
that they love working together. Well, that really didn't show up with the six women who are
successful in CS fields until later. Actually individual achievement was really important. Now
community was important which means their peer groups in the groups that they felt that they
had a kinship with, but not necessarily working together as a team to achieve something. Now,
I can't make a declarative statement because this is six interviews, but there's an interesting
trend there that starts to buck some of the assumptions that people make about how it is girls
function in work and play spaces. So I think what that means is that we need to do more
analysis on this and right now I've got incredibly rich data sets from these six women and so the
next step is to do a much deeper discourse analysis of it looking specifically at how these
women are describing their schooling experiences, what trends emerge in their word choice
around framing their identity and around their values, because I think that's going to give us a
little more as far as clues about trends, deeper quantitative analysis of rankings definitely
expanding that dataset and I think it would be really interesting to expand the dataset to
include men, because right now it is all women and so we can't say women are different than
men because we don't have any basis for making that statement. We can just say these women
who are successful show these trends. And then it would be really interesting to take this
protocol and then adapt it for younger audiences. And looking at clubs like the StudioK clubs
that are doing Codu curriculum and learning to game design in groups to see how they are
actually talking about value sets while they are in that age group and see if, do trends align?
Are they showing that there are different patterns based on reflective recollection of this was
my life story? Some things that really came up strong were that all of the women had early
experiences with technology. So that means that we need to take a really close look at what
are kids doing at a young age? How are they connecting with content? And that’s kind of my
segue into the work that I did with the younger audiences in looking at playful learning with
Kinect Sesame Street TV. So first my theoretical frames are really about the difference between
interaction and participation, so interactivity and participatory experiences. If you've seen Dora
the Explorer, Blue’s Clues, even traditional Sesame Street, they are very participatory, so Dora
will say we need to get in backpacks, backpack. Say it with me. Backpack and everybody says
backpack and, you know, the kids at home might say backpack; they might not, but she's calling
out a response from the children. Say vamanos and then they all go. Sometimes kids respond
to that and other times they start getting kind of tricky about it going, I didn't say it. You know,
but basically there's a call for participation, but the system doesn't necessarily respond. When
I'm talking about interactivity, some people use interactivity to describe that as well, but I'm
talking about having a system that actually responds to the cues of the participant. And so
that's what Sesame Street TV, Kinect Sesame Street TV and Kinect National Geographic TV do.
They provide a situation where the activity is relevant to the content but then also it's
responding to the actions of the participant and so that's a really important distinction in what
makes the potential learning difference. Also is the connection with narrative world. So this is
the frame that I am kind of using to think about narrative worlds. If you imagine that this is a
narrative world. A narrative world kind of being this story space but I don't want to limit our
understanding of narratives strictly to a story, because activities, actions, mechanics et cetera
help to contribute to that broader narrative. That becomes the story that we live and we tell
through our experiences, so this narrative world, let's imagine Pokémon. So there's this world
Pokémon and the goal is to get at meanings and pleasures. That's the thing that the
participants want to reach. Whether it's entertainment, whether it's learning, they both kind of
happen together too, but meanings and pleasures are created at the heart of the activity. So
here's a platform. There's a platform, there's a platform. Maybe this is cards. Maybe this is a
videogame. Maybe that's a movie. Maybe that's toys. Maybe that's a comic book. And that a
true Transmedia experience is going to happen with different activities that come into this
narrative world through different products or platforms. And you go into this narrative world.
There's meanings and pleasures. It's a two-sided arrow because activity means you’re bringing
stuff in but it also means that you’re pushing back out, so the experiences you've had, if you
remember that picture of Connor, he plays Mario right? But then he also creates his own
narrative so the narrative boundary of this world is constantly being pushed against. It's
constantly changing because of the participant’s experiences. So this is not tightly bounded at
all. And so when you think about learning in this way, we see that it's really deeply tied to a set
of activities and practices. And that that's really where the experience comes from. So in the
1970s, television experienced a revolution with Sesame Street. In the ‘90s shows like Dora
Blue’s Clues, they came on the scene and it continued to experience revolutions in the way
television facilitated learning for different age groups. I feel like we are on the cusp of a new
paradigm shift with using something like the Kinect for TV. It's important to think that this isn't
necessarily a game and this is actually something that kids picked up on really well. This is not a
game because it doesn't follow the same conventions of what this bounded choice space looks
like and the meaningful choices that you make within that space and the way that responds to
the player, but it is not flat TV that doesn't respond to your physicality and doesn't respond to
the way that you participate within that space. So that's what Kinect play for learning was
about. But it's standing on the shoulders of giants because when you look at the research
history of Sesame Street, it's rich. They show that the traditional Sesame Street model works.
Kids learn. There's over 40 years of research saying that this model works and so for Microsoft
this was a pretty big task. I mean that's a pretty big call. You want to do something that kind of
disrupts traditional television but you don't want to do it in such a way that it takes away from
the good that you know already happens. That was what kind of framed this study was looking
at things like situated learning theory, how does the way we're tying our physical activity to the
choices that you make and the actions that you do in this interactive space, how does this have
to do with the way we think about our bodies as far as the concepts that we are learning. How
does this include accessibility like that anybody can come in and become a participant in this
space and that it's having a dialogic TV experience because this is how play happens, where we
have these cultural icons and symbols and it's this dialogic experience between them and then
the meanings and pleasures of this narrative world get built. So what we did was a pretty
intense study and I need to say that the dataset is so big that I've named him Willis. A friend of
mine actually encouraged me to name him Willis so I can say which you talking about Willis?
And I think Willis and I are going to get incredibly intimate and we are going to be talking for a
very long time, but what it was was three phases of data collection with two groups of kids.
The first group had a traditional build, so all of the flat footage from the Kinect episode was
edited into a flat traditional episode that went along like a regular television show. The other
half of the kids got the Kinect episode where the system responded to their physical
movements and choices and the interactivity of that episode was all on. For the first phase
they came into the lab and we did a pretest; we viewed the episode together and then there
was a mid-test. After that they got a disk with whatever the version was that they were
watching. They went home and they played that again and then they came back in the lab a
couple of weeks later. We had a final viewing where we watched it again and then at the end
of that we did a post test. In addition to the video data from them being in the lab, I have a
parent survey and I also have parent feedback from when they were at home and a lot of the
parents journaled for me and talked about the experience they were having in the home. So
what we were specifically looking at are questions of viewing, interaction, comprehension and
replay. So for viewing, what does engagement in Sesame Street Kinect TV look like for three
and four-year-old participants? For interaction, how do participants demonstrate engagement
when utilizing interactive features of Sesame Kinect TV and how do participants not using
interactive features demonstrate engagement? For comprehension, what concepts of
participants of interactive and traditional episodes learning? And then for replay, it's basically
all of this but how does replay impact that? Does this change over time? For the assessment
instruments there is questions about letter H recognition. This particular episode that we used
for the study and it was the same episode across the entire study, if you need to know about
the letter H or the number 5; I just encourage you to ask me anything you want to about it
because I'm an expert at the H and the number 5. I watched that episode at least 84 times
during that six weeks time. I know this stuff now. So we would do questions about letter
recognition. The development of the assessment instrument was actually kind of interesting
because in the show, in the Kinect episode there was a lot of participatory experiences, so to
design a flat assessment doesn't really make sense. You want to design an assessment that also
situates the learning. You want to design an assessment that also brings participants into the
world of play but also gives you the opportunity to see them perform what it is that they know.
There's letter H recognition. There's relational concepts, so over, between and across. We
looked at counting and enumeration for the number 5. Narrative prediction and retail for the
street story. The concepts measure and launch, so starting to look at stem concepts and how
the kids discourse actually starts changing around these concepts as they are watching the
show. Looking at stem values of curiosity and wondering and then feedback from the episode
where they were looking at the different segments of the episode and telling me about what
was taking place in them. So what we did was there were more close-ended questions and
there were more open-ended questions. I provided a lot of visual cueing and then we had
manipulables to do a lot of the questions. Here's an example. When we talked about the
street story I would say what happened in this story? What was this about? What is Baby Bear
doing there? And if they were able to tell me measuring I could ask what is that? When you're
measuring, what is it that you're trying to find out? In addition, we would talk about the
activities that they did so with Kinect Sesame Street TV if you aren't familiar with that, there's
the letter of the day, the number of the day but there's also a move of the day that entices you
to get into the show by doing a physical activity. So this particular one the move of the day was
throw. So we talked about what did they do in these designed experiences for throwing and
how did that connect to the different concepts. So this one actually connects to relational
concepts because you're throwing across, over and between and doing it with Elmo and Paul
Ball. So like I mentioned they are supporting data. While we were doing this with kids, the
parents were taking a survey and this is something that as we do more quantitative analysis,
this is going to be really nuanced and it's going to be really interesting to kind of suss out if
there's really anything happening there, but looking at parents attitudes towards different
kinds of media -- so I had a set of beliefs statements like does this media help my child do
better in school, help them be more creative. It's a waste of time. They learn useful things.
They learn the things that don't matter in our households, or bad values and beliefs. And then
what do they think about those beliefs statements for toys, TVs, video games, internet sites and
books. So there's also a lot of data about that that we could eventually start looking at with the
kids engagement data or with the way they're talking about different concepts. Does this play
into it at all? Also, the coding that's still taking place right now is for every child for every
episode looking at interval coding. And so this is based on an actual Sesame Street coding
scheme that was then modified so that it started looking at situated cognition, physicality, the
interaction that's happening in these specific episodes, so it's not for specifically the television
show itself, but for looking at how you're interacting and physically interacting in that space as
well. So coding for these markers and then looking at how does that differ for boys and girls?
How does that differ for Kinect versus traditional? How does that differ for maybe kids that
tend to be heavier TV and game, TV watchers and game players, because that's part of the
parent reporting as well. So these were the participants. It was about half male and half
female. They were all between three and four years old, well, three and five years old and we
had internal and external participants. The reason being to get that high of a number, there
were 42 total kids, to get that high a number and to get that many in a shorter timeframe we
did need to open up to both, but we were screening for a number of different variables and so I
was able to mark for that to in the dataset so we can look at if that makes a difference as well. I
also for the majority got their annual income, so we can also look at rankings of socioeconomics
because access is something that we can't ignore. And by access I don't just mean people
having a Kinect in the house, but access to knowing how to work with different kinds of
information and stimuli. So we had 21 in the Kinect group and 21 in the traditional group and
that was the kids and it happened over six weeks and so what we found this I think is a win.
Because one of the biggest things we needed to find out was if we start messing around with
Sesame Street's format it has to do at least as well as this incredibly high bar, and that
happened. So we can say that Kinect in traditional groups had statistically significant increases
from pre to mid to post. The interesting thing is it didn't matter on the group. It's not
necessarily that Kinect users did better than the traditional. They both learned. It's not
significant that there's a difference between the two. It's not significant that gender plays into
that. But that's based on very specific set of questions. That's based on letter recognition.
That's based on relational concepts, so over, between and across and it's based on enumeration
and counting. So they matched it. And these are the types of assessments that Sesame does.
So that assessment model matched the type of assessment model that Sesame uses and it
matched it, so I say that's actually a win for the property because that bar started off really
high. But what I can say and this isn't done being quoted yet, I can say that there's a significant
difference in the way kids are engaging with it and in the kinds of discussions that we’re having
around content. So that's still an analysis right now and I don't have anything declarative to say
about that yet. This is preliminary. Also what we got from the preliminary sets of data is that
we need to dig deeper. There are some really interesting things that have happened. So for
example, relational concept between, this is like actually a really funny story that I love. What I
did for this assessment was we had two bowls upside down and I would give the kids the
opportunity to be part of the play experience. I never told them it was a test. We were always
playing games or doing activities, and I turned the bowls upside down and said oh, what should
these be? Should these be hills or should these be mountains? And whatever they said, that
was what we did. And then I'd pull out Cooper. That's Cooper Monster and he's important in
the show. Then this is his buddy Flash and there's a pond over there and that was just a foam
core piece of blue and we had to play a game where we help Cooper find Flash by flipping a
card that had a relational concept so either across, between or over and have the child
physically pick up Cooper and have him find Flash by doing it in the way of that relational
concept. Over was pretty straightforward, we'd say over, they'd pick him up and if they had it
they would like move him over the whole thing and then boom he finds Flash, yay. And if it was
across the pond he would like a go across the pond and they got it or they didn't. It was pretty
easy for those two concepts to assign a one or a zero on; they got it or they didn't get it.
Between messed all of that up and I wasn't ready for that, and I feel like some deeper analysis
of how they physically do the gestures of between is going to be really important. Because you
might think that from an adult perspective the most logical way to do between, if I say help
Cooper find Flash by going between the hills, you're going to run him and you are going to run
him and you're going to run him and he's going to come over here, but that didn't happen for
all of them. Some of them would grab Cooper and go over this one, land him in the center and
jump over this one and then get -- well, and you could argue one that was kind of over, but no it
was also between. Like that still follows the rules of betweeness. Then there were some that
would actually pick this bowl up and slide Cooper straight against the floor across the floor to
the other side of the bowl, well that's kind of between too, right? I mean, because they are
going between the floor and the bowl. When you think about the real world, you can't really
slide under a mountain, like you are kind of duck diving under a wave or something. Like that's
not really possible, but in this world it was because you can pick up this bowl and you can go
between. The one that slayed me, and this is so amazing, they picked up the ball, right? So
here's the bowl and then they pick up Cooper and they are going like this and then looking at
me like I'm an idiot, right? It's like you can't go between -- I can't molecularly shift the atoms of
this bowl and make Cooper go between this bowl. Like yeah, I apparently didn't get that one
right, because the child looked at me like I had just set them up for failure by asking them to go
between. That's really interesting, that their construction of meaning with the word between,
like I was talking to an early childhood education specialist and we were talking about this and
she said, you know, I'll bet you could have an entire career based on the word between. You
probably could. So that's something I think that is going to require deeper digging and it just
shows that the gestural behaviors of the kids in the assessments are something that need to be
looked at. Another great example -- let me see. Do I have that one? Let me do this when first.
Okay. Another funny example was for the word measure. We talked about measuring and one
of the little girls had said in the pretest before we had even watched the first episode, I said
well, what is measuring? When you are measuring, what are you trying to find out? And she
says how tall, how tall something is. And I go okay. That's measuring, okay. So in the story
that's part of this episode Hubert the Human Cannonball is trying to launch precisely 5 feet
across Sesame Street and into a bucket of blue gelatin. So then Baby Bear comes and measures
5 feet, so after we watched the episode I said so what is measuring? What are you trying to
find out? And she says how tall. So that changed, right? She's using the same word, but she's
going how tall. So she's understanding that there is a horizontal distance thing that's
happening in that episode, but her words don't necessarily demonstrate that she had the
vocabulary for the nuance of that meaning. And so that's why it's going to be really important
to dig deeper on how kids are talking about things, but what they are physically doing with their
bodies as they talk about these things, because as they are situated in the meaning, as their
heads are kind of thinking like my body has a role in this understanding of this concept, they are
going to display that in different ways. All right, I'll do this when too. The number one kind of
broke my head a bit and so I've been talking with math specialists and they actually have some
theories on why this one took place. So again, remember how I was saying how I would, we
would do this kind of imaginary clay for the assessment and so I'd say, do you know what an
orchard is, an apple orchard? It's where there's a lot of trees with apples on it so it's like an
apple farm. I said so let's pretend that you and I and whatever parent was in the room were
walking through this apple orchard and my gosh, we found these apples and I flipped the page
and there's a picture of five apples. Can you count how many apples we found? A lot of kids 1,
2, 3, 4 5. Great. What we're going to cook with apples today. What should we cook? Should
we make cookies, apple cookies or apple cake or applesauce? And they would choose what we
wanted to cook with the apples and cookie monster came out and he was going to be cooking
this recipe. And then I pulled out the green bowl again and said well, for that recipe we need
exactly 5 apples. Can you put 5apples in this bowl? The number of kids that got the first one
with the enumeration correct and that were able then to put five in the bowl was very
different. Not as many kids had success in counting apples and putting them in the bowl as
they did in enumeration. It's a different kind of application with a number. One of the theories
is that they're having to hold two things in their head at the same time with the knowledge that
it's supposed to be five but then we also have this separation because there were seven apples,
so there were more than they needed, so having to distinguish what five is in comparison to
this amount that they have here and then some are in the bowl and some are not. Some kids
would use strategies like they would count five first, draw the line, push the other two apples
away and then just grab them and throw them in. That was a pretty successful strategy. But so
again, something really interesting having to do with the numbers and the way that they are
demonstrating their knowledge of the numbers. So deeper analysis is needed. Like I said, Willis
is huge. He's a beast. And so this is where the analysis is heading next. Looking at the interval
coding for behaviors and responses with what engagement exactly looks like. I'm looking at a
quantitative analysis based on multiple variables like coming in deeper with maybe where some
of these nuances are. Looking at proposal sampling where we've got some kids that we know
are talking about things in pretty interesting ways, so doing full transcripts of what it is they're
talking about and doing a discourse analysis of how are these concepts moving from their
mediated experience, so what they are doing with the television show into how they are talking
about it with me. And then gesture analysis of their content descriptions. I actually want to
show you a few videos --, la la la -- of some of the video data. So this is a child that is, he is
watching a traditional episode. So this was pretty common. [video plays]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: So for a lot of the kids doing the traditional episodes they stayed
sitting for almost the whole time. Thanks. Some would get up but the majority would stay
seated but would still participate from their chair, so made respond but it was often like
halfhearted and some would get frustrated because of the timing. Like I threw it and then I
have to wait for it to happen. So that's pretty common for the traditional viewers. There's
another traditional viewer and how she engaged with Grover in throwing coconuts.
>> Grover: Did you get that one? Did you miss it? Nice shot. Now I have two coconuts in the
box. One more time. Throw me a coconut. I am ready. Throw the coconut to your old pal
Grover.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: I noticed that by the second time they were watching it they would
know about how long they had to wait because of the replay, they would know about how long
they had to wait for the next throw, but again, she sitting on the floor and she still -- I mean
she's still participating, right? She's still following up with the keys of the television. It's just
engagement is looking very different than the children that are doing a Kinect version. So
here's a Kinect version. Not that one. Let's do this with. And so here's throwing the ball again.
[video begins]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: It was also really sensitive, so when they would when they would
throw you would see immediately, so like they may not have waited for Elmo's entire queue.
They would just do it. [multiple speakers on video]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: On the second -- oh, this is the frog one. He liked the frog. Oh, no,
it's not the frog one. There was a lot -- the second time they came in to see another interesting
thing that happened was a lot of the kids would do things and then look at me and go see, like
they’re teaching -- the first time they didn't have the mastery of the show but based on the
replay later when they would do it there was a lot more interacting with me and making sure
that I could recognize for them that yes, they had learned how to watch the show, which does
follow some of the research done by Blue’s Clues looking at how kids learn to watch certain
television shows. But that was pretty interesting with the kids saying see, see. So here is one
where, this is during the assessment part and we are talking about -- oh, did I just close that?
Hold on. You want to see this. It's hilarious. This is one of the girls who, no, yep -- this was
during the assessment as we're talking about some of the stories and this is her telling me
about the story that had to do with measuring and launch. [video begins]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on the video: So here's a picture from the show.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: She didn't want to talk about measuring.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on the video: What was that story about? Can you tell me what that
story was about?
>> Child on video: Him, him him -- is he a boy?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on the video: Yep, that’s Baby Bear.
>> Child on video: Well, which one is a girl?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on the video: Um, on this story there is not a girl.
>> Child on video: Oh, and he is Chris.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: That is Chris. And we don't see in this picture Hubert, but
Hubert is around somewhere too. So what is this story about?
>> Child on video: Um, human the cannonball.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Uh-huh.
>> Child on video: I don't know his name.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Hubert the Human Cannonball.
>> Child on video: Yeah. Hubert, Hubert yaa [laughter]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: So what was Hubert trying to do?
>> Child on video: He was trying to go across the street and in the bucket of blue jellybeans.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Uh-huh.
>> Child on video: [inaudible] what are you going to do next?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: I don't know. Maybe it's just on Sesame Street? What is
Baby Bear doing?
>> Child on video: She’s going to measure.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Measure?
>> Child on video: Five feet.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Uh-huh.
>> Child on video: I was going LAUNCH!
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: And he was going to launch?
>> Child on video: I was going to launch.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild on video: Oh, you're going to launch. If you're going to launch, what
happens when you launch?
>> Child on video: I go up on the ceiling, then I get [inaudible] then I don't know which way did
I pop it? I go… [video ends]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: So she's like completely put herself in the story now. She
understands that Hubert ends up with his feet stuck up near and she's telling me she's
launching and she's showing me feet up in the air. And she proceeds to make up this huge
story about, and then I got stuck by the blue goo and then this happened and then this
happened and she kept doing that our entire interview. At the end she kept making up the
stories that were based in the narrative of the show but then she would expand on that and
make this huge thing happen. Funny aside because when you're working with 3 to 5-year-olds
you are getting cute stuff like all the time, major cute overload. This one, Ernie sings a song
about wondering why and we talked about wondering and what is wondering and do you
wonder about things and so in the middle of the song in the episode he's singing I wonder, you
know, what makes the birds go, sing the song they do or why do the stars sparkle? What makes
a bunny go hop hop hop? What makes the popcorn go pop pop pop? She walks up to me and
she puts her hand on my knee and she goes he doesn't know anything? How come Ernie
doesn't know anything [laughter]? And like that was hilarious, but you can absolutely read it
that way, right? I mean we are like in this adult mode of all, this childhood wonder band asking
questions of the world around us and her read on this was completely like he knows nothing,
obviously. But then later in the interview she was saying how she doesn't know anything. At
least that's what her sissy tells her. But there's a lot of connecting to the self and you hear that
when the kids start talking about their experiences. Another one she did, she was really rich in
connecting from the show to her own personal world. Elmo's world featured a horse and so
when we were talking about the horse in Elmo's world, she points to it and goes when I get
older me and my sissy are going west. And I'm like, oh, sweetie, you're in Seattle. [laughter]
you don't get more west then this. But she like had this complete connection with horses and
the wild west and she's like it's going to be hot, so we gotta get older and stronger but we gotta
go west. And there's a great example of when you have multiple narratives from multiple
worlds converging, right, and she's starting to pull in these icons and the symbols and these
ideas from different narratives that she's experiencing and pushing them together into the way
that she's constructing meaning with the things that she's seeing. So, kind of fun. Okay, where
is my mousie? La la. The kids got really attached to the assessment. They wanted to take it
home instead of a toy sometimes. Like I had one girl pitch an actual fit where I had to hide the
assessment instruments while her mom was like redirecting her with a toy. And they all got the
choice of a new toy for the toy bin. No. Some of the kids were like I want that. To green bowls,
some foam core pieces but the thing was when you think about it they got to be involved in
that play space, right? There was a different kind of involvement happening. And I think one of
the things that that's kind of telling about is that when there is a connection with an experience
and they are then connecting with the content of the experiences in the show to actually
playing it out, something happens there where they then start moving from a participation
within that product or platform to taking it outside the bounds of that product or platform.
Another example of this is a friend of mine, her son was really into Angry Birds and this was
before Angry Birds got big. This was before they like over marketed the heck out of that thing,
but it was when it was pretty much just the app. And he decided that he wanted to play Angry
Birds but he wanted to do it in the house, so he drew his own, used ribbon as the slingshot and
then started pulling couch pieces off of the couch and building this giant obstacle course and
trying to fly these paper Angry Birds at things, got frustrated when it didn't get knocked down,
but hey, that's a really good lesson in physics, right? I mean paper has a certain kind of strength
or hardiness and couches have a certain kind of strength or hardiness and to push something
over takes a different kind of physics. So he's having these experiential learning, just
experiencing this with the things that he made because he was driven by this narrative world
and then took it outside of this narrative world. And so these experiences, our mediated
experiences can really serve as catalysts for then moving into maker spaces and playfully
looking at playful work and creation. And so the third study that I've been working with has
been looking at StudioK which as I mentioned is a curriculum, a game making curriculum for
clubs right now, but looking at an online curriculum that links to Codu and doing game design
through Codu, but also starts bringing in telemetric data so that you can see how players are
spending their time, whether it's in editing or programming or playing and starting to look at
patterns that emerge in different kinds of players and what does that tell you about the kinds of
learning that is taking place. So that's what StudioK is. And so the research questions we
started looking at here with this kind of maker space of a mediated experience where
something interest driven takes you into the desire to, I want to make games, right. So how can
themes of computational thinking be used in observational protocol to support telemetric data
in StudioK? How do group dynamics in a club setting influence information seeking behavior?
And how is gender a factor in a group dynamic. And so this is optimal with two observers and
this is what's going on right now, so we developed this protocol and it's being used in Boys and
Girls Club's right now looking at a site description, so what is the general site? What are the
resources? What is the kids’ energy like when they come in for the club and then every 10
minutes using a new sheet with the themes so that we make sure that we are addressing all of
the themes regularly throughout the observations of looking at debugging, logic and feedback.
How are they talking about figuring out the answers to problems or how they are explaining the
programming that they are doing with other people or with the facilitator. How were they
talking about design or a user experience, like designing for the idea that somebody is going to
play this? And then looking at information seeking in the group dynamics? Who's talking to
who? Is it a facilitator talking to people? Are the kids talking to each other? Does gender play
into that? On conveying information, is it a guiding thing where okay, first you do this. Now
what do you think you would you? Now what do you think you would do? Or is it telling like do
that do that do that do that or give me the controller. You do this. Because those are different
kinds of showing and how does that all play out in the dynamics that are happening in these
club spaces? And what happens then is you start to see what the telemetric data looks like so
this is the kind of telemetric imaging, the output from the telemetry. So you can see over time
where the points are that they are doing more editing in the world, where they are doing
programming with objects and where they are playing. So this one is somebody who's going to
play; they play the game a lot. This one is someone who is actually doing more looking at the
world, then objects, worlds, objects, play it out. How does it go? Okay. There might be an
issue. Coming back, reprogramming that, try it again and so you can see how different kinds of
users are going to be doing different kinds of things. What might this mean though? Does that
necessarily mean that they are playing for that long? What kinds of things are happening in the
run that the telemetry can't necessarily tell us? So by doing these observations we can start to
see what's happening on the dynamic and with the kids and with that group and how that
might link and help us understand more about the telemetry. So that's going on and that's in
process now, so I don't really have outcomes to share with you except that's how we're looking
at that. So in conclusion, and since I have the floor, I figure I get to say the things that are really
important to me. I was talking about LifeSpan technology as not the lifespan of the piece of
hardware but of our life span. And so in intentionally leveraging the power potential of lifespan
technologies it means that we need to be designing products and environments with an eye
towards activity and practice. So what does that even mean? How does this activity move a
participant towards meaning and pleasure? How do these activities and practices empower the
participants to make larger connections beyond just the product? Or even have the product or
environment serve as a catalyst for deeper engagement and creative expression. So this means
different kinds of things to different kinds of development. So maybe what that means for
work force development is increasing the number of females in computer science. It's not
necessarily about persuasion, but it's about leveling the playing field. It's about understanding
what are the experiences that young women, young girls are going through, how they engage,
what their practices are like, what their activities are like and then leveling that playing field so
that there aren't the same barriers that exist and let them make their choices. So it's not just
persuading people to go into a field. It's making sure that nothing is going to stand in the way
of them making that choice. What does that mean in designing for kids? Well, it means that
kids are way more complicated than a less learned grown-up. They are not going on this
trajectory from knowing a little to knowing a little more to knowing a little more and so, it's a
big grown-up now. It's a way more nuanced. It means that when you're thinking about
childhood it means we're not thinking about just anyone under 18 years old. Different things
happen in different places. And childhood is a culture that needs to be respected because it's
an interesting kind of an indigenous culture because it's so tightly relies on its own cultural
networks and frames, but just because we were once kids doesn't mean that we can ever claim
allegiance and identity to that culture again. Once we're out, we're out. Therefore it needs to
be respected in the way that we listen to them, the way we understand them, the way we
understand that development is so much more nuanced than little grown-ups. And what that
means for thinking about spaces for play, work and creation is we need to consider our
opportunities to move participants into deeper activities and creation spaces, so things like
Codu where you're actually doing something that has interest driven learning and allows you to
create in this mediated environment that takes you through these different types of narratives
and allows you to help create your own narrative and your own experience. Compelling
narrative experiences are catalysts for this kind of participatory movement. And that's I think
what I care the most about is those things. Actually, one thing I forgot to mention was in the
Tech Trajec-Stories the stories with the women in CS fields, one thing that was a theme across
the majority of them was they all had some kind of deeper interest driven learning taking place
in their younger years. As one of them described, I was really into games. I built my first
computer when I was in high school, but it wasn't because I knew I was interested in CS; it was
just because that was what I needed to play games. And so these powerful experiences of
interest driven learning can become that catalyst for much deeper things to happen. And that
is my presentation. The research is ongoing. There's a lot of data. There's a lot of questions to
be asked continually and I'm actually really looking forward to even though my internship is
ending, it doesn't mean that analysis is ending and hopefully there will be really, really exciting
things to share in the future as we start to get even more nuanced and dig deeper into these
datasets. I'd like to open it up for questions. [applause] yes?
>>: So you mentioned this interest driven learning was important for some of your subsets of
females [inaudible] so recently I sponsored this Goldilocks project. This is a kickstarter
[inaudible] San Francisco, she wanted to design engineering tools for girls. And what she found
out was that, you know, all the building blocks, the tables and stuff were all geared to boys and
the girls they were just pink, but the girls were not, you know. Although, pink is more appealing
than other colors, but that's not kind of appeals to the girls. What she found out is the girls
they are really interested in story making. They want to tell stories about a lot of things, so
when she designed this engineer school for girls she's so like everything is about making stories,
right? You build stuff to make it make stories. So I thought that that kind of observation was
pretty kind of interesting. I mean she's still making toys. It is not up in the market yet, but I'm
trying to see whether you had some kind of similar observation in terms of for girls, you need to
have some kind of different sort of motivation for them to be engaged with engineering.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: Right, and I think that's one of the things that in looking at the
gender differences across the different types of research, I think that's one of the things that
hopefully is emerging is that there are boys that really like to create narrative worlds as well.
There are girls that connect with narrative in different ways, but then you also don't want to
just pigeonhole a gender and say this is what you do and this is what you like. I think one
reason that mind craft is as exciting and compelling as it is is because it does give the
opportunity for those that want to do the narrative in the story building the opportunity to do
so, and that for those that are really into different styles of play that that affords them the
opportunity to do that as well. And so one thing I think that was striking in the conversations
with the woman in CS fields was that yes, there were some things that stayed true to
perceptions that we had of females and their experiences in their life stories, but there were
definitely things that also defied the things that we thought we knew, things showing things like
group work isn’t important until you are a grown up. And so I think in thinking about toys and
play spaces which really are so rich for meaning making and play is just so so important, I would
challenge anybody to consider not to pigeonhole a gender but to break down the barriers that
allow them to experience different kinds of building and meaning making. Yeah, I get really
irritated with pink Legos, seriously irritated. One of my women who was interviewed said how
they used to play theater and role-playing was a big thing for her when she was a child, but she
mostly played with boys and then they always got in fights because she didn't want to be the
pink Ranger and like because that was their token female one right and it was the pink one and
she was like I hate pink, want to be the pink Ranger and that was like she's playing with the
boys but still they are trying to pigeonhole her to the pink one, but I mean there are different
kinds of experiences and I think we need to respect gender little bit more than that. Yeah?
>>: I'd like to just ask your opinion on a couple of things outside of just the empirical study just
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on a couple of aspects of this. One was that you
mentioned the importance of narratives to engage in these deeper kinds of participation, in
these play spaces. What do you think about use of an existing narrative like Sesame where the
kids have knowledge of it? I mean, you mentioned too that we had to kind of move into that
world and try to do what we wanted to do within that space, so that versus maybe the
development of entirely new kinds of narrative properties.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: So new narrative properties are exciting, and if of course, if they hit
that sweet spot of whatever it is that makes them awesome, like and sometimes I hate to say
this, but sometimes it's a marketing sweet spot like with Skylanders. What's happening right
now with Skylanders is it’s like exploding and that's a kind of new property. I mean it's building
on old Spyro, but it's also like this new world. So I think there's something to be said for new
properties definitely, but where that sweet spot is needs to be looked at as far as what is the
practices and activities that take place within that world, and how can that world then become
a catalyst for deeper practices and activities? I had another thing to say on that, crud.
[laughter]
>>: [inaudible]
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: Yeah.
>>: This is just in the general of, you know, your experiences with interactive storytelling as
they were. You were able to contrast the passive classical human experience versus this
interactive experience and it's interesting to me because you're dealing with an audience that is
sort of, they're not, they don't have two or three decades of experience with the passive. You
know, they are -- and I'm just wondering were there frictions to the interactive narrative
experience?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: I don't think friction, because it wasn't necessarily interactive
narrative where the choices that they made changed major outcomes in the story the way you
would think of really, really richly developed narrative experiences like perhaps some of the
more -- I'm trying to think of one off the top -- like massive fax [phonetic], right, where you're
looking at a rich narrative that has specific outcomes in the way that something is played. That
being said, that narrative experience isn't really only about this story but is about the set of
practices and what they're doing in their head and how they're taking that outside of that and
connecting to those concepts. I remembered what I was going to say before. There was a
study when you are looking at younger kids I think there needs to be a mix of the familiar and
the unfamiliar. There have been studies that show that when younger children are being
taught something, there was one where they are being taught something from Elmo and they
were being taught something from somebody new that they totally didn't know, they trusted
Elmo more because they knew Elmo already. And so they actually found for that particular
comprehension that they were looking at kids who experienced it with Elmo did better because
they already had a relationship with character. That's not to say that we should just stick to the
ones that we have because there's definitely something to be said about the kind of attention
drawing that new experiences provide for younger audiences. I mean that's when you have
deeper tension is when you, when you are wanting to connect to it and you want to figure it
out, that's when you're drawn in, right, when there is something new in those confounding
things that you are trying to piece together, so yeah. Anything else? No.
>>: I have a question.
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: Yeah?
>>: When you were first starting this I think you had some kind of expectation about what prep
style comes in success was and, you know, clearly the kids learned as did [inaudible] property.
Are there things that you have not been able to measure or didn't think to measure but you
would design differently in the next study that would give you the kind of better insight about
what the outcomes might be?
>> Meagan K. Rothschild: There are definite -- so there were a couple of things that I changed
on-the-fly. Like after a couple kids I'm like whoa, this has to get adapted now or I'm just not
going to get the richest data possible. One was the decision to measure the launch and it
originally had been precisely and what I had done was I did a content analysis of that episode
and I got word frequencies. What are the words that actually come up the most to see how
they are connecting to the things that are most reinforced and precisely was like that had high,
high, high frequency in that episode, so did launch. Precisely had a little too much. It was just a
little too ambiguous for that age group so that's when understanding your age group really is
important and even wonder was like not to be crass, but it was a bit of a crapshoot. Like, that's
a tough one for three and four-year-olds. It's abstract. But, on the off chance that they were
going to get it, I wanted to have a conversation about it. I think for changes I think I would
design some of the relational context stuff a little differently. With what problems I had with
the word between, I think I'd like to mess with different ways of showing expertise like that
concept and different ways to perform it for me in a play space. So that's one thing I think I'd
do differently. And then I think as I go through the discourse analysis of the transcripts of the
kinds of conversations that we had after the open-ended stuff, I think there's going to be a lot
of really interesting themes that come out that I could also start to use in a tighter testing
capacity. Yeah. All right. I guess we’re done. Thanks.