Children’s engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is fundamental to developing scientific literacy. Informal learning environments, such as children’s museums, are a robust setting for fostering STEM engagement, particularly through parent-child interaction. Although the role of STEM learning has been frequently documented in informal learning environments, how children are engaged by STEM topics and STEM’s relation to children’s everyday lives has not been equally well studied. In this article, I suggest that there are ways that parent-child interaction during informal learning opportunities can relate to children’s engagement in STEM activities. A fundamental mechanism underlying this relation is how parents support children’s autonomy as they play together. Parent-child interaction relates to children’s STEM engagement not only in situ but also in how they generalize that behavior to their everyday activities, which opens up promising new lines of research.
This content will become publicly available on May 11, 2025
"It's Not a Replacement:" Enabling Parent-Robot Collaboration to Support In-Home Learning Experiences of Young Children
Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children’s learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children’s learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3–5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children’s learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms.
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- PAR ID:
- 10538453
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400703300
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 18
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Honolulu HI USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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