Social online games like Minecraft and Roblox have become increasingly integral to children's daily lives. Our study explores how children aged 8 to 13 create and customize avatars in these virtual environments. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations with 48 participants, we investigate the motivations behind children's avatar-making. Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance. In addition, designed monetization strategies play a role in shaping children's avatars. We identify the ''wardrobe effect,'' where children create multiple avatars but typically use only one favorite consistently. We discuss the impact of cultural consumerism and how social games can support children's identity exploration while balancing self-expression and social conformity. This work contributes to understanding how avatar shapes children's identity growth in social online games.
Regulatory shifts are increasingly placing the onus on online service providers such as digital game developers and platforms to ensure that their services do not harm children. This creates an urgent need to examine how children experience and conceptualize harm in digital contexts, which may differ from adult-driven perceptions of harm. In this paper, we present the results of a study into children’s experiences with game monetization which included a ‘think-aloud’ method in which children were given an AU$20 voucher to spend. Through our participants’ (aged 7-14) vernacular of feeling ‘scammed’ or ‘tricked’, we argue that children experience harm principally through being misled or deceived by monetization features, rather than being due to what parents perceive as a misattribution of value toward digital items or overspending. Based on these results, we make game design recommendations to minimize children’s harmful experiences with game monetization strategies.
Critical thinking plays a crucial role in children's education for fostering cognitive development, cultivating independent thinking habits, and enhancing their ability to problem-solving. However, the current educational model places greater emphasis on children's understanding of factual knowledge, with relatively less focus on developing critical thinking skills. We present CharacterCritique to support children's critical thinking based on the theory of inquiry dialogue. This tool uses an analytical story as the medium, it encourages dialogue between parents, children, and story characters. Through this process, children continuously engage in interpretation, analysis, explanation, evaluation, and regulation, all of which promote critical thinking and decision-making. Such interaction is supported by multiple agents. In our between-subjects study (n=32), we compared CharacterCritique to traditional storybook reading. The results show that CharacterCritique is more effective at sparking children's interest in deeper discussions. It also better fosters critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and creates more opportunities for parent-child dialogue.
There are many initiatives that teach Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy to K-12 students. Most downsize college-level instructional materials to grade-level appropriate formats, overlooking students' unique perspectives in the design of curricula. To investigate the use of educational games as a vehicle for uncovering youth's understanding of AI instruction, we co-designed games with 39 Black, Hispanic, and Asian high school girls and non-binary youth to create engaging learning materials for their peers. We conducted qualitative analyses on the designed game artifacts, student discourse, and their feedback on the efficacy of learning activities. This study highlights the benefits of co-design and learning games to uncover students' understanding and ability to apply AI concepts in game-based learning, their emergent perspectives of AI, and the prior knowledge that informs their game design choices. Our research uncovers students' AI misconceptions and informs the design of educational games and grade-level appropriate AI instruction.
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh is home to numerous Indigenous ethnic communities, and their languages, rituals, and values are distinct from those of the mainstream population. These differences, coupled with the past eight decades of turbulent political history, have contributed to the decline of communal harmony among different stakeholders in this region, which has been further aggravated by the advent of social media. In this work, we study the unique challenges faced by Indigenous young community members in Bangladesh when using the social media. Through a qualitative approach involving interviews and focus group discussion sessions, we investigate the online experiences encountered by this population along with their protection and coping mechanisms. Our findings provide a nuanced portrayal of both the internal and external challenges faced by these users. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in HCI and offer a few design recommendations.
Designing for others encourages children to empathize with and consider different perspectives and needs. A chatbot persona could allow children to design for stakeholder groups that are challenging to involve directly in educational activities, such as people with disabilities. In this paper, we explore how an artificial intelligence chatbot persona leveraging the GPT-4 large language model can support children's design empathy while designing for others. We report the design, development process, and implementation of a chatbot persona representing a 12-year-old child with low vision named Noel. The exploratory case study consisted of three 90- to 120-minute workshop sessions with nineteen students (ages 11 to 13) in a grade 6/7 classroom. Results illustrate ways that Noel supported students throughout the design process, their expressions of design empathy, and their experiences. We present implications for developers and educators along with future directions for research.