Effect of digital assistant use on children's theories of artificial minds
Embedding computers and the internet in everyday objects has resulted in connected and interactive homes. Parents can lock their doors, dim the lights, ask if the fridge is out of milk and order more, all with their voice during family dinner. While this may seem futuristic, 46% of adults use digital assistants (PEW, 2017) and Amazon reports selling over 100 million Alexa digital assistants across 28,000 form factors (e.g., speaker, picture frame, Bohn, 2019). The connected home environment of today’s child begs the question of how the use of digital assistants will shape children’s beliefs of how intelligent technologies function (i.e., theory of artificial minds) and influence how children evaluate information learned from these knowledge objects; important questions considering people’s difficulty identifying fake news online (i.e., Pennycook & Rand, 2018).
The proposed research will detail how parent’s use intelligent technologies in the home and identify whether parents and children’s use of digital assistants to conduct everyday knowledge search (e.g., ‘Alexa, who is the president of the USA?’) affects children’s ability to identify false information learned online. Research shows that people’s ability to identifying false information on websites is poor (54% accuracy; Rubin, et al., 2015) but that attending to the source and authorship of a website can lead to improvements (Alemanoo, 2018). Since digital assistance do not provide source information, use of digital assistance in the home may increase children’s trust of technology and decrease their ability to be critical consumers of online information.
The goals of the research are:
1) Determine the frequency of parents and children’s digital assistant use in the home.
2) Detail the types of knowledge search parents and children conduct via digital assistants.
3) Assess the level of reasoning children ascribe to digital assistant (e.g., can they be wrong and why).
4) Investigate whether children’s TAM affects their ability to detect misinformation online.
Are educational tablet games helping or hurting children’s flexible approach to mathematics?
Teachers and parents are being asked to incorporate tablet computers into their children’s education in the hopes that this new technology will prepare the next generation for the challenges of the 21st century economy. For mathematics education, tablets are primarily being deployed at the elementary level and the majority of math applications available today involve the gamification of fundamental arithmetic skills (e.g., solve a series of addition problems and then be rewarded with a mini-game; McEwen & Dubé, 2015). Unfortunately, these types of math games may actually be hindering children’s flexible mathematical thinking. Some games require effortful, split-second responses and this can be so cognitively exhausting that children have insufficient energy (attentional resources) to think flexibly about mathematics. This research project will identify the type of activities that hinder flexible mathematical thinking and then determine whether the tablet games currently used to engage children with mathematics are helping or hindering their flexible problem solving. As a result, guidelines will be created so that parents, teachers, and schools can make informed decisions regarding the use of tablets in their children’s mathematics education.
Identifying quality educational apps: Lessons from ‘top’ mathematics apps in the Apple App Store
Full-text: 
identifying_quality_educational_apps.pdf
Educational apps have gained considerable attention from developers since the recent growth in the use of touch-screen devices among kids. Despite the popularity of these apps, little is known in terms of how the developers or companies advertise these apps in the App store. This information is critical for parents and teachers to make purchasing decisions for children, since it is arguably parents who are most likely downloading these educational apps (Dubé & Keenan, 2016). The present study examines how game developers advertise their apps and what features the parents value when selecting apps from the App store.
Let’s make a math game: Developing an educational computer game to better understand how development constraints shape the games kids actually play
We are currently designing and building an educational math game using the GameSalad development platform to better understand the challenges developers face when creating quality educational games. The goal is to see how pedagogical goals combine with and come up against the limitations of the development platform during the process of game design. A lot of research is done on what a good educational game should look like. However, too little of this research considers how games are actually made.