Just read a short conference article by Alma Leora Culeon from the Designing for Kids conference. It was a decent little case study about how they’ve been employing basic User-Centered Design (UCD) techniques for involving children in the design process of a children’s museum. The article speaks of an evolution toward more involvement by the children in the process – from basic in involvement in usability testing, to more direct involvement in the design and even early formative planning stages.
While it’s great to see the conversation about involving children in the design process, the fact that they were involved and the broad descriptions of how they were involved didn’t provide much insight in to what was different with involving the kids from general UCD best practices methods. Usability testing, contextual inquiry, participatory design… it’s great to involve the kids in that, but those are pretty standard ways of doing good UCD.
What the authors didn’t get in to, and I would have liked to see more about, is what is different about doing these things with kids. Can you reasonably expect kids to “think out loud” during a UT? Probably not (especially with younger kids). So, what do you do about that? What kind of scaffolding might be needed to get good insights during a participatory design session with kids? Is it more productive to involve trusted adult figures? Would it more effective to make it a social design experience, involving many kids at once?
The best practices that we’ve established in UCD have been envisioned and refined within the context of designing user experiences for adults. Kids aren’t just small adults. They think, learn, and act differently. While I wouldn’t expect to see any ground-breaking new theories or methods discussing in a conference article such as this one, I would have liked to see the potential differences mentioned.
Time to go dust off some Seymour Papert or Alan Kay or…
Years ago (if I tried to remember how many, I’d have to do math), I taught a summer school program on “Lego Logo” to a group of 5th and 6th-grade boys. I was working on my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and studying how kids learned about math and science. The research group that I was in focused a lot on things like model-based reasoning and cognitive modeling. The programming the kids learned how to do (lots of turtles drawing lots of interesting shapes) and the robots they built were intended to help kids learn fundamental ideas about how the world we live in works – how shapes can model how nature works, how physical systems can be understood as an interaction of fundamental principles, etc. Fun stuff. BTW, I was put in charge of the group of 5th and 6th grade boys during this summer school class because the folks in charge (my advisors) figured I was the best one there to handle a group of kids whose mission in life was create programs and robots that would result in the biggest collisions and explosions. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about gear ratios and acceleration by trying to make stuff blow up!
Fast forward to today. For the past 3+ years, I’ve been coaching at least one First Lego League (
erits of model-based reasoning and the design process is not always the most accessible way of explaining the value of the program to parents and other folks 
So, I usually focus on the other real reason why I do this. My new spiel to parents is that this is not about Legos. This is not even really about building robots or writing programs, though the kids will learn a lot of really useful skills there. What this is really about is teaching the kids (or, rather, letting them learn) how to work as a team, how to tackle large problems that are too big for any one person to handle, decision making, prioritizing, and planning. The nature of the program is that it’s intentionally too much to do in too little time. This is usually the first time these kids have had to work together… really work together… in a team of 5-8 kids. Sometimes those kids already know each other, but usually not. Sometimes they’re about the same age, but sometimes not. Sometimes they like each other, but sometimes not. How are you going to make decisions? What roles are you each going to play? What are the roles?
on designing for kids. The bad news for me is that it’s just about over… and in India. I should have planned my next trip to India this week!
The Keiser Family Foundation recently released the third round of their 
While the average total time per day of media use was about 7.5 hours (wow!), the number grows to about 11 hours when you factor in the time splitting that kids do by using more than one form of media at a time (e.g., listening to music on their iPod while surfing the Web). Eleven hours is a staggering number, but the notion that kids are time splitting is not surprising. What’s interesting to think about, though, is how that time splitting is affecting how the kids consume and use the information they’re getting. Today’s kids have been called the “ADD generation” because of the pervasiveness of media that delivers content in bite-sized chunks and the ease with which they can bounce from one piece of content to another. The study lends credence to the notion that kids are juggling lots of pieces of info. There’s been a lot of concern that this kind of content consumption is detrimental (”they never get a chance to think deeply about any one topic”), but I think you could certainly also make the argument that they are getting good at managing the increasing flow/flood of info and becoming more literate in an evolving information ecosystem.
Other than these interesting finds, there were a few methodological things that caught my attention. For example, the study works off the premise that the delivery format for the media is the most interesting way to break up the info – tv, computer, video game, music player, etc. However, I would argue that the content format might be a better way of looking at things… or is, at least, a different and equally interesting way of looking at it. The authors go to some length to explain that kids may be watching a television show on the computer but that time would count as computer use, not tv use. Why? If a kid visits a web site on their iPhone (lucky kid), that would count as “cell phone” use, not computer use. Why? To me, an equally interesting differentiation is that the kids are watching “pre-programmed entertainment” or “visiting a web site”… no matter the medium (though medium will clearly affect some things). In today’s media world, it becomes increasingly difficult to split hairs about media format and content type anyway. If a kid visits a web site via her Nintendo DSi, is that playing a video game? If they read a New York Times article on their Kindle, is that using a computer?