Cooperative Inquiry is a method of developing technology in which children and adults are partners in the design process. Researchers use Cooperative Inquiry to empower children in the design of their own technology and to design technology that is specific to children's needs and wants. As Cooperative Inquiry is continually evolving and expanding, it is important to consider how researchers can extend this inclusive design approach to work with populations of children with disabilities. In a semester-long case study, researchers explored the use of Cooperative Inquiry in a classroom of middle school boys with learning differences, including mild to moderate autism, specific learning disabilities, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The participating class of 10 boys ages 11-12 designed a browser-based computer game using Cooperative Inquiry over the course of six design sessions. During the project, the children had overall positive experiences and were able to form partnerships with the adult researchers to develop the game. Based on the experiences of all the team members, researchers make recommendations for employing Cooperative Inquiry in special education classrooms. These include adding informal time during the design sessions, maintaining a high adult-to-child ratio, giving instructions using many modalities, and planning for high engagement. Through this work, researchers broaden Cooperative Inquiry's applicability to a new population in a classroom setting, and provide guidance for designing with populations of children with special leaning needs in the future.
We aim to understand how to help young people recognize the value of science in their lives and take initiative to see the world in scientific ways. Our approach has been to design life‐relevant science‐learning programs that engage middle‐school learners in science through pursuit of personally meaningful goals. In this paper, we analyze the case studies of two focal learners in the Kitchen Science Investigators life‐relevant, science‐learning program. Our analysis highlights ways to design life‐relevant science‐learning programs to help learners connect science to their everyday lives in meaningful ways. Our findings point to the ways in which learners' dispositions develop, which have implications for the design of programming and learning environments to promote the development of scientific dispositions.
Children under age 12 increasingly use Internet-connected devices to go online. And while Internet use exposes people to privacy and security risks, few studies examine how these children perceive and address such concerns. To fill this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of 18 U.S. families with children ages 5-11. We found that children recognized certain privacy and security components from the contextual integrity framework, but children ages 5-7 had gaps in their knowledge. Children developed some strategies to manage concerns but largely relied on parents for support. Parents primarily used passive strategies to mediate children's device use and largely deferred teaching children about these concerns to the future. We argue that helping children develop strong privacy and security practices at a young age will prepare them to manage their privacy and security as adolescents and adults. We offer recommendations to scaffold children's learning on privacy and security.
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