“Let’s Draw Chocolate Milk Together”: Supports and Challenges for Families’ Joint Engagement with Artistic Tablet Apps

Teaching Preschoolers Theory of Mind Skills With Mobile Games

“…Meaningful adultchild co-play supports and enhances young children's learning from educational apps (Neumann and Neumann, 2014;Radesky et al, 2015;Sweeney, 2017;Neumann, 2018;Rasmussen et al, 2019;Toh and Lim, 2021). In the process of digital co-play, adults scaffold children's learning by engaging them in dialogs and explaining complex concepts (Yelland and Masters, 2007;Bindman et al, 2021), directing children's attention to the specific content and highlighting important information (Sobel et al, 2019), providing affection and encouragement (Yelland and Masters, 2007;Wood et al, 2016), and helping with technical and physical tasks, such as logging in, typing, and touching the screen (Reich et al, 2012;Wood et al, 2016). However, studies have found that joint media engagement does not require adults to be co-playing the game for it to be beneficial for learning (Eisen and Lillard, 2020;Musick et al, 2021).…”

“…There is evidence that interactivity and parental engagement are beneficial for children's learning of various skills, including coding, math, literacy, and some social-emotional, from digital games, yet whether they impact the ToM skills is unclear due to the lack of research on the topic. The preschool age of the participants was selected because ToM gains are most rapid between 3 and 5 years (e.g., Tompkins et al, 2019), and by four years of age, most children are capable of playing digital games independently but still benefit from adult support (Pempek and Lauricella, 2017 as cited in Bindman et al, 2021). Furthermore, given the potential of digital games to serve as a scalable platform for delivering ToM interventions, we proposed ToM-focused design suggestions to be used by edutainment game developers.…”