Attendees of this talk will gain a greater understanding of the roles that digital media play in learning and meaning-making across the span of childhood, and discover strategies for leveraging the power potential of digital worlds for learning and content engagement. Meagan Rothschild weaves together three of her studies from the course of her six-month Microsoft internship into a larger discussion framing “lifespan technologies” as the roles of digital media from the young through workforce development and beyond.
The story begins with findings from a series of interviews with successful younger women who are at various stages of study and work in the field of computer science. The life stories of these women shed light on the roles of technology and social dynamics for females who find power and purpose in the field of computer science. A common thread weaving through the stories is early engagement with media, creating a segue to question how interactive media can be used to support early learning. Meagan investigated this topic with a study of Kinect Sesame Street TV, and specifically tackles questions related to comprehension, engagement, replay, gender, and embodied cognition.
The session concludes with an overview of research conducted with the implementation of StudioK (Kodu curriculum) in after-school programs in both Bellevue, Washington, and Madison, Wisconsin, investigating specifically how social dynamics play out in mediated environments of play and creation within the contexts of game design and computational thinking for middle school students.