CHS: Small: Supporting 3-4 Year Old Children's High-Quality Social Play Through Voice Agents

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

Children born in the mid 2010s in the United States are arguably part of the first generation that has been able to make meaningful use of computer devices for as long as they can remember. Given this, it is important to make available technologies that benefit young children's development. One area of development that is often overlooked is self-regulation. Several large studies show that high-quality social play helps young children develop self-regulation, which in turn enables children to perform better in kindergarten and beyond. High-quality social play typically involves groups of children engaged in pretend play that includes common goals, planning, role-play, interactive social dialogue, negotiation, improvisation, and the use of generic physical props as opposed to realistic toys. However, implementing high-quality social play requires a significant amount of teacher training. This project will focus on lowering barriers to facilitating high-quality social play activities through the development of StoryCarnival. StoryCarnival will consist of an application for teachers and caregivers to set up and plan play activities, and voice agents to support high-quality social play as it happens. The development of StoryCarnival will lead to novel explorations of voice agents to facilitate face-to-face social activities. The software developed will be freely available and outreach activities will include national and regional conferences for preschool educators. This project addresses three main research gaps brought about by the increasing availability of interactive technologies for young children: identifying common and critical skill deficits for 3-4 year old children that may be addressed through interactive technologies; developing design methods to use with this age group; and identifying technologies other than mobile devices that may be developmentally appropriate for this population, sustainable, and broadly available. This project will expand on prior research that identified executive functions including self-regulation as a common, critical skill deficit for 3-4 year old children, and high-quality social play as an activity that can enhance these skills and may be facilitated through interactive technologies. This project builds on this foundation with the primary objective of developing and evaluating an innovative approach to voice agents through StoryCarnival, an app to facilitate high-quality social play that supports wide distribution, data collection, English and Spanish language use, and long-term deployments. With this infrastructure, the project will then focus on the iterative development and evaluation of voice agents combining caregiver control with smart recommendations. The approach will be to enable caregivers to keep track of play context, give them options for voice agent control based on context, and ask them for feedback on how well specific agent interactions worked in order to improve dialogue and activity recommendations. The project will include evaluations of the impact of StoryCarnival on high-quality social play through a combination of field studies and automated use logs and surveys with a larger number of users. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.