Designing and Using Social Media for Childrens’ Science Learning

How can we design and use social media with children? It’s a complex issue that is less explored in the research literature (for a myriad of reasons related to policy, safety, convenience etc.). Add onto that the complexity of “learning” science; how could we use social media to promote science learning for children?

I’m really excited to share our paper, which will be presented at the CSCW 2014 Conference in February, called “Selfies for Science”. It’s a case study of our 2-year design process of a social media app for kids called ScienceKit, and how new types of collaborative learning configurations can happen when we implement it in an informal science program.

Check out the paper here.

IDC 2013: Social Media and Learning Papers

My colleagues and I presented several papers at IDC 2013 related to our work with designing social media and alternate reality games for learning! Check out the papers below, as well as some cool videos that showcase this work:

Bonsignore, E., Hansen, D., Kraus, K., Visconti, A., Ahn, J., & Druin, A. (2013).  Playing for real: Designing alternate reality games for teenagers in learning contexts. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenNew York, NY. [PDF]

Ahn, J., Yip, J., & Gubbels, M. (2013). SINQ: Designing social media to foster everyday scientific inquiry for children. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenNew York, NY[PDF]

Ahn, J., Gubbels, M., Yip, J., Bonsignore, E., & Clegg, T. (2013). Using social media and learning analytics to understand how children engage in scientific inquiry. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenNew York, NY. [PDF]