Thanks for sharing your work!

Can you share any additional details or best-practices that have emerged for using media and state partners to reach and encourage parents to lead these activities with their children?

Hi Gerald,

Thanks for your interest in our project. Our work with state partners is in process, but here are recommendations and best-practices with regard to joint-media engagement with parents and children. 

• Although caregivers do not generally have preexisting knowledge of CT, they see the importance of teaching CT to young children.
• The use of simple, easy-to-understand catchphrases that highlight core CT strategies can support joint parent-child engagement in CT exploration. (Catchphrases are short, repeatable phrases that serve to remind children of key CT concepts: we used “check your steps” and “make it work” for debugging; “create, test, improve” for design process; and “step it out” for sequencing.)
• Characteristics associated with successful joint engagement in CT include activities that give children agency and avoid a lot of rules or prescriptive directions and ones in which caregivers encourage their child to lead or collaborate with them.
• Videos should feature comprehensible, appealing storylines with room for the characters to notice something that is causing a problem, to discuss the problem and how they might solve it, and to demonstrate the process for how the CT strategy aids the problem-solving process.

Let me know if you have any questions and further thoughts for discussion. Thanks! Marisa Wolsky

This is such a neat project!

How did you recruit caregivers and children to test out the materials? I'm also curious to hear more about the kind of training and support that's available for the caregivers. Is their comfort and familiarity with the concepts also growing through the project?

Thank you! Caregivers and children were recruited from early childhood education centers in the Northeast, US. Because EDC researchers found it challenging to recruit families in earlier phases of the research, they made significant changes to their recruitment process, including starting earlier, casting a wider net, and incentivizing centers to help recruit families. As a result, EDC was able to enroll 151 families in the study, representing a significant over-enrollment beyond our initial goal of 120 families.

Prior to testing out the materials, caregivers were not given training, but they did participate in an initial orientation session, during which they completed a pre-survey, oriented themselves to their tablet, and received a schedule of media and activities to explore with their child over the next 6 weeks. The materials caregivers were given, though, did give them an overview of CT and emphasized activities that incorporate CT into everyday family activities like setting the table. EDC researchers are in the process of analyzing the data from this impact study, including comparing caregivers' responses pre- and post- the intervention. When they are done, we will be able to assess whether caregivers' comfort and familiarity with the concepts grew. 

Thanks for your interest in our project! Marisa Wolsky

Thanks for sharing this very interesting work! I agree with the theory integrated in this project that is student early exposure to computational thinking (CT) or any other concepts could affect their later interest and pursue further knowledge in those areas. I would like to know more about the experimental impact study you are currently undertaking. Could you share more information on the study design approach (e.g., randomized control trail) and instrument to measure the outcome of interest (assuming is children’s computational thinking skills)?

Thanks for the detailed explanation about the study design and outcome measures, Heather!